Argentinian-born New Yorker Mika Rottenberg has become the toast of the Manhattan art scene thanks to her distinctive films often featuring "remarkably endowed women – body builders, contortionists, giantesses, porn stars" says art critic Laura Cumming. In Dough, a "regiment of women stacked one above the other in makeshift plywood cells, pass the eponymous dough through an absurd production line that involves, quite intimately, sweat and tears"
Photograph: Courtesy of Nicole Klagsbrun and Andrea Rosen Gallery Photograph: Action images
In this film, set "in a claustrophobic factory, botched together from gaffer tape and cardboard, three women are somehow transforming red fingernails into maraschino cherries" Photograph: Courtesy Nicole Klagsbrun and Andrea Rosen Gallery
"Squeeze takes the production of lettuce and latex and turns it into full-scale carnivalesque. Women mash lettuce and blusher into revolting cubes of detritus; others flay great mountains of rubber into lettuce-leaf thinness; still others massage the arms of their fellow workers in a roundelay of non-stop labour" Photograph: Courtesy Nicole Klagsbrun and Andrea Rosen Gallery
"This film is based on the 19th-century Sutherland Sisters, a family of women with rapunzel tresses who performed for Barnum and Bailey and sold their own hair-growth formula. Rottenberg found their latterday equivalent among a group of fanatics in the south, women whose crowning glory is so improbably long it takes hours to wash and comb, can be used for all sorts of bizarre purposes and has to be hung up on hooks overnight" Photograph: Courtesy of Nicole Klagsbrun and Andrea Rosen Gallery
"Rottenberg studies her subjects with awe, while simultaneously writing and directing their outlandish performances. There is a pervasive sense of amazement, which is as well communicated to the viewer as her ambivalence about employing their labour"
Photograph: Courtesy of Nicole Klagsbrun and Andrea Rosen Gallery Photograph: Action images
