It is everywhere: inside us, beneath us, structuring our environments, our bodies, our desires. Plastic, appealing, smooth, adaptable, and, therefore, the ultimate embodiment of capitalism. Plastic assumes any shape without memory, without loyalty, without history, except for the one it retains fossilized and trapped, unable to return to a cycle: ancient sunlight.
Mika Rottenberg knows this only too well. Which is precisely why she does not position herself against capitalism stricto sensu, nor does she construct an external vantage point from which to denounce it. Her work does not pretend to innocence. Instead, her practice begins from a far more uncomfortable place: full implication. Rottenberg’s work reckons with the dialectical condition of being a consumer, with how desire circulates through materials, bodies, and systems of production, and with the inevitability of economic, institutional, sculptural, and filmic verticality, within which art is always already inserted.
This verticality is not abstract. It is the same vertical logic that gathers political and economic elites annually in Davos, the mountainous retreat insulated above the very terrains from which value is extracted. It is the same vertical logic that governs supply chains, borders, museums, and wars.
At the Lehmbruck Museum, this verticality becomes both legible and unstable. The museum is a vertical labyrinth itself: a brutalist construction designed to elevate sculpture, to remove bodies from the realm of labor and place them in a site of contemplative stillness; a space conceived to suspend time, history, and conflict. Rottenberg punctures this structure not rhetorically but physically—through holes. Through devices that force the viewer to bend, crouch, peer, and wait. Vision becomes partial, while the impossibility of escaping the engraining system remains total.
The exhibition “Queer Ecology” has little to do with natural entanglement and everything to do with nature’s disappearance. In Rottenberg’s work, there is no nature left to return to. Everything unfolds artificially, through interruptions, leakages, and detours—cracks through which global production chains, their self-critique, and sculpture’s historical promise quietly leak. This is not ecology as harmony, but ecology as aftermath.
“We are unable to move away from plastic. So it’s a way to live with it,” Rottenberg says.
Plastic is sad. It resists its own smoothness. It is energy that cannot decompose, that cannot re-enter the ecosystem. Rottenberg avoids the word “recycling”, rightly naming it a dead word—a petrochemical scam designed to shift responsibility from producers onto consumers. What happens in her studio is reclamation. A small-scale refusal of waste as destiny. Waste is just a design flaw.
Fig.1
Rottenberg’s newest series, Lampshares, extends this logic into a rudimentary, fragile circular economy. LEDs and reclaimed plastic are melted and reformed, appearing almost as prosthetic replacements for wildlife—objects longing for something else, slumping back into organ-like forms, becoming blobby, irregular, excessive. In doing so, the artist slaps the fantasy of return out of view.
The separation between what is organic and what is synthetic no longer holds. Nor does the distinction between kitsch and sobriety remain stable in the exhibition rooms—especially as the museum succumbs elsewhere, hosting a parallel participatory show, “Plastik Fantastik”, featuring works by visitors. Yet what Rottenberg actually exposes is not the artificiality of plastic, but its obedience. And obedience, I would say, is the opposite of queerness.
This is why the title is not a discursive provocation, but a painful recognition of our asphyxiating surroundings. A world in which Rottenberg’s characters—human and non-human alike—are forced to sequester their queerness in hysterical, excessive displays: pastoral fantasies in artificial prairies; scenes of human exploitation in pearl cultivation in China (NoNoseKnows, 2015); surreal loops of processed food production (Neeze, 2012); and the vast emptiness that devours time itself (Time & A Half, 2003).
Fig.2
You might think these films are allegories, but they are actually diagrams. They trace the operational grammar of a world organized through an integration that masquerades as reciprocity.
Rottenberg shows how the mechanisms of subordination work, how supply chains, infrastructures, and dependencies can be weaponized. Participation does not guarantee protection. In her work, as in the present geopolitical order, there is no outside to the system—only different positions within it, each differently exposed to exhaustion, extraction, and collapse. This also reflects that there are two different temporal periods colliding in the show: the time before and after Rottenberg’s working with one of the largest galleries in the world, Hauser & Wirth, reflecting the precarious and the opulent paths along which she has operated so far.
In Rottenberg’s films, integration is always uncanny. It appears as a system of connections that promises efficiency while engineering dependence. Bodies are linked to machines, machines to commodities, commodities to distant markets, yet no one controls the circuitry they are trapped inside. A woman turns a crank that activates a process she will never see completed; another performs repetitive gestures that sustain an apparatus, the purpose of which remains opaque. These are not images of production so much as rehearsals of leverage. What looks like coordination is in fact exposure: the tighter the connection, the easier it becomes to interrupt, to extract, to punish.
Fig.3
This is why Rottenberg’s films feel viscerally connected to current events at the beginning of 2026. I can’t stop thinking about Mark Carney, the Prime Minister of Canada, while looking at Rottenberg’s disgusting, solipsistic playfulness with matter. It was Carney (of all people, a former Governor of the Bank of England and archetypal technocrat) who dismantled the lie of “business as usual” this week in Davos, admitting that we no longer live in an era where global integration can be naïvely described as being mutually beneficial:
The story of the international rules-based order was always partially false. We knew the
strongest exempted themselves when convenient. We knew international law applied
with varying rigor depending on the identity of the accused or the victim. We participated
in the rituals and largely avoided calling out the gap between rhetoric and reality. That
bargain no longer works.
Economic integration itself has become a weapon of war. The logic is the same one now governing global politics: tariffs operate like sudden blockages of a conveyor belt, financial infrastructures resemble off-screen switches capable of freezing motion, and supply chains reveal themselves as fragile sequences where pressure applied at a single node reverberates across entire populations. You do not need bombs when the system already contains its own points of collapse. This playbook—used most recently against Palestine, Venezuela, and Iran—is now turning inward.
Against this backdrop, Rottenberg’s insistence on foregrounding labor, women’s bodies, and closed circuits of production acquires renewed urgency. The conditions of labor for the global working class—especially women—are staged with particular sharpness at the Lehmbruck Museum, even when slapstick threatens to soften the blow. The building’s bright, empty brutalism was conceived to host Wilhelm Lehmbruck’s sculptures: elongated, melancholic bodies, predominantly female, withdrawn into vertical silence. These figures stand apart from labor, from circulation, from use. They are elevated—literally and symbolically—into sculptural autonomy.
Lehmbruck’s Four Women, Big Composition (1914), a painting “hidden” behind one of the concrete walls enclosing the main inner sculptural garden, crystallizes this parallel. The four bodies are roughly painted. They appear monumental yet lethargic, their gazes distant, their softness suspended. I look at them and think, these are not empowered bodies; they are bodies shaped by gravity, by time, by an unnamed weight. The same drained gaze reappears among Rottenberg’s protagonists. A century apart, the bodies speak the same exhaustion. What has changed is not the condition, but the system that organizes it and how visible it is to our eyes.
Fig.4
Rottenberg’s presence turns the museum into a site where two regimes of femininity overlap: one monumental and withdrawn, the other grotesquely operational. Both are disciplined. Both are verticalized. Both are shaped by labor, whether sublimated into form or exposed as absurd repetition. The verticality of the global production chain is the silent axis that runs through Rottenberg’s exhibition. Institutional collections, private or public, like the capitalist system they were born into, are vertical too, stacking value, visibility, and legitimacy move upward. Sculpture, historically, is vertical in the most literal sense: it stands, rises, separates itself from the ground. Rottenberg does not deny this lineage. She works inside it. And then she drills holes through it.
This is where Rottenberg’s critique becomes precise. It does not operate through denunciation, but through reorganization of experience. You consume the work as the work consumes you. Her films have long excelled at this dynamic. They map global production chains not as didactic explanations, but as absurd theater. Labor becomes choreography. Exploitation becomes slapstick farce. Systems are revealed through rhythm, repetition, and excess. Slapstick plays a crucial role as a destabilizer, keeping the works funny and devastating at the same time.
Yet not all of Rottenberg’s films carry this tension with equal force. REMOTE (2022), her first feature film, marks a shift in the exhibition’s tone. Following four women from Iran, Argentina, Puerto Rico, and South Africa, the film foregrounds empathy, connection, and shared temporality across screens. Here, friction softens. The closed loop opens. Irritation gives way to solidarity. The system becomes atmospheric rather than oppressive. Rottenberg’s characteristic vexation returns most forcefully in the sculptural works. Lips framing peepholes. Silicone flesh pressed against walls. Loops of tongues, braids, skin, hair, color. These works demand proximity—though they are repulsive, too, in their exaggerated, nonsensical appeal.
Is this an invitation or a trap? I would say both. Seduction is not opposed to critique; it often is a primary tactic. Rottenberg mirrors this logic, implicating desire rather than denying it. You want to look. You want to touch. You want to consume. And in that wanting, the work exposes the mechanisms you inhabit daily. So, yes, there is nothing queer about plastic. And yet, when plastic starts to carry memory, texture, excess, it entangles itself with life. Queer ecology emerges as the discomfort that cannot be resolved.
//
- Images
Cover: Mika Rottenberg, Cosmic Generator, 2017 (Video Still) © Mika Rottenberg, Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
fig. 1 Mika Rottenberg, Lampshares, 2024, © Mika Rottenberg, Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, Foto Pete Mauney
fig. 2 Mika Rottenberg, Cosmic Generator, 2017, © Mika Rottenberg, courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, Foto Fabian Strauch
fig. 3 Mika Rottenberg, NoNoseKnows, 2015 (Video Still), © Mika Rottenberg, Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
fig. 4 Mika Rottenberg, #33 with bamboo and bicycle, 2022, © Mika Rottenberg, courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, Foto Fabian Strauch
