A giant bubblegum-pink totem has been erected in the sculpture park at the Tinguely Museum in Basel, an institution dedicated to the work of Swiss post-war sculptor Jean Tinguely, best known for his Dadaist kinetic automatons. The bulbous pillar seems out of place amid Tinguely’s browning metal sculptures that dot the lush green park; it is cartoonish, fleshy and phallic, with water sprinkling from its top and causing a muddy circular patch to form around it. Come closer, and the totem reveals itself to be shaped like a giant foot, complete with red-painted toenails and pockmarked with rounded red mouths, some with pink tongues sticking out.

This cutified vision of a sick limb brings to mind a host of visual references ranging from Pink Panther to Philip Guston, all typified by a similar dualism of abjection and temptation. The work is a new fountain sculpture by New York artist Mika Rottenberg, titled Foot Fountain (pink), (2024). However, it won’t become a permanent fixture in the sculpture park — it’s part of her largest retrospective to date, Antimatter Factory, which is travelling around Europe through 2026, making two additional stops at the KunstHausWien in Vienna, and the Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg. The experience of Rottenberg’s work sparks a very specific reaction within viewers. With a heady combination of beguiling humour and a buffet of sights and sounds, the artist draws parallels between bodily functions, biological processes, and sites of production. Rottenberg’s works are often felt just as much as they’re seen: noses drip, sweat beads collect on foreheads, and characters in ill-fitting business wear sneeze; this is often mirrored in the viewers’ bodies, with palpable discomfort or relief.

Inside the museum, the retrospective includes some of Rottenberg’s most iconic video installations, such as NoNoseKnow — a highlight of the 2015 Venice Biennale — and Cosmic Generator — memorably installed inside an abandoned supermarket when it premiered at Skulptur Projekte Münster in 2017. There are several mechanical works, which visitors are encouraged to activate, light-emitting constellations of mushrooming sculptures and automatons; these include a disembodied twirling ponytail appearing from a round opening in the wall and a spooky long-nailed finger emerging from a smaller hole, poking the air menacingly. “It’s as if Tinguely’s work grew hair and nails, maybe some mushrooms, and put some makeup on,” Rottenberg quipped when I asked what it means to her to hold a retrospective of her work in a museum dedicated to Tinguely’s nonsensical, self-operating machines. “It’s such a great place, and they also really know how to take care of work that is experimental. I love his work, and I think he might have liked mine.”

“His work is so much about mechanisation and fake processes, machines and absurdity, and mine is too, but you can also see that it’s made in a different time, with globalisation and the digital era,” she says. “Tinguely’s work is so analogue, and my kind of flirts with the digital world and the immaterial world, in addition to actual gears and processes.” Rottenberg’s films propose post-Fordist production lines that outsource even human interactions and emotional labour and offer an absurdist socio-political commentary on globalisation. Things like cheese or pearls are presented in her films as both culturally significant products and the biological excretions that they are. Her new three-channel video installation Spaghetti Blockchain (2019-2024), shown here for the first time, is a trippy foray into increasingly immaterial realms. It includes footage of Siberian female throat singers, a Bitcoin mine and a potato farm, among other things. Rottenberg created the work following an artist residency at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research. Based in Switzerland, it operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Thinking about this dissonance of scales — the largest accelerator made for the smallest known particle, the Higgs boson — ignited an exploration of a different kind of imperceptible chain reaction.

“I was thinking about the deep psychological relations between the human body and the material world, as something that we produce, consume and are consumed by, like our relationship with microplastics for example,” Rottenberg says in the show’s digital catalogue. “Spaghetti Blockchain can be seen as a factory for the production of sensory reactions in viewers’ bodies, as a way to examine the toxicity I am attracted to and repulsed by. It’s also a cry for a better relationship between humans and the materials we produce and that in return consume us and our planet.”

I was thinking about the deep psychological relations between the human body and the material world, as something that we produce, consume and are consumed by, like our relationship with microplastics for example – Mika Rottenberg

This ecological underpinning extends to Rottenberg’s choice of materials, sublimated into a new series of sculptural works that give new meaning and shape to plastic. Titled Lampshares, this series was created using discarded plastics from housing complexes in Harlem, gathered and repurposed by a community organisation called Inner City Green Team. The Lampshares resemble a sprouting biological growth, a crude-oil polymer overstory of glowing materials that cannot decompose. Or as the artist puts it, “Plastic is a contemporary natural resource.” Strewn around the exhibition in different combinations, the Lampshares emit a dim light, an added pseudo-functionality that tinges these witty objects with heaps of melancholy.

“Plastic, as a fossil fuel byproduct, is ancient life trapped without the ability to decompose and complete a cycle. This is why it’s such a tragically attractive material,” Rottenberg says.

Mika Rottenberg: Antimatter Factory is on display at Museum Tinguely in Basel until November 3, 2024.