What’s recycling good for, asks Mika Rottenberg at Hauser & Wirth Menorca

‘Recycling is a failed system,’ declares Argentina-born, US-based artist Mika Rottenberg from her studio in upstate New York. ‘Nothing actually will get recycled, even in New York Metropolis, it is a full catastrophe.’ This damning verdict underpins Rottenberg’s new exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Menorca, ‘Vibrant Matter’, a direct response to the damaged guarantees of a future that by no means arrived.

Throughout two movies, drawings and a brand new collection of sculptures, Rottenberg’s exhibition as a substitute ponders what might need been. With an emphasis on the haptic and fluid, Rottenberg toys with the transformation of matter into different states, a reminder, in different phrases, of all the pieces recycling promised. But for all of the exhibition’s critique, Rottenberg is raring to clarify that ‘this isn’t an answer, that is simply, what do you do with a lot trash?’ Her response? ‘You are able to do one thing fairly with it.’

For her new Lampshares (2025), Rottenberg has created brightly colored luminescent fungi that erupt from partitions, ceilings and plinths, or just lie on the exhibition ground like gnarled reclining figures. Past their Grimm fairytale seems, these sculptures embody her curiosity in alchemical transformation. Combining bittersweet vines, an invasive species that chokes the forests surrounding Rottenberg’s studio, with waste plastic that’s collected from the Bronx and East Harlem earlier than being melted and remoulded, these psychedelic, eerily anthropomorphic lamps flip toxicity into a chance for reinvention.