In July 2019, the New Museum hosted a special conversation between artist Mika Rottenberg and New Museum Curator Margot Norton on the occasion of Rottenberg’s exhibition “Mika Rottenberg: Easypieces”. In her first solo museum show in New York, Rottenberg’s work traced central themes in the artist’s oeuvre, including labor, technology, distance, energy, and the increasingly interconnected relationship between the mechanical and the corporeal. Through these works, Rottenberg explored how seemingly insignificant objects and practices can radically alter human climate, social structures, the ways human beings communicate and interact with one another, and aspects of that existence that cannot be elucidated or even imagined.

In this conversation, Rottenberg and Norton discussed how the artist created her semi-fictitious worlds populated by extreme bodies and the surreal origins of commodities like maraschino cherries, pearls, and tissue paper, touching on themes of distance, labor, transmission, and the relationships between materialism and matter.