Glasgow International Festival of Contemporary Art

NoNoseKnows & Squeeze

Photograph of a video installation with chairs in the foreground, and a screen in the background. An image of a person with a very long nose and wearing a blue jacket is visible on the screen.
A white-walled exhibition space with a picture on the wall. The picture has a blue background, and a figure.

NoNoseKnows & Squeeze

In NoNoseKnows, Rottenberg drew parallels between the culturing of pearls in China and empty housing developments littered across the country.

Within an anonymous building, we witness Bunny Glamazon, a 6'5" blonde Amazonian woman, in her supervision of the pearl-making process. Self-inducing an allergic reaction causes her nose to inflate and grow, where she sneezes out various noodle dishes, eventually popping the enigmatic bubbles occupying various rooms of the building.

Squeeze continues Rottenberg's inquiry into the mechanisms by which value is generated, considering the logistics of global outsourcing and the alchemy of art production.

Footage from a constructed studio set in New York is linked to a lettuce farm in Arizona, USA and a rubber plant in Kerala, India. This film is an architectural portrait of crisscrossing assembly lines: a multidirectional labyrinth that spins energy within a closed circuit. The central protagonist the product, is only revealed through its raw ingredients. In the continuous video loop, the manufacturing process is never completed, remaining in constant flux.