"[5] "Her works allegorize the increasing capitalization of biological life itself: not what labors produce but what bodies consist of, grow, secrete, and reproduce….by exploring relations between immaterial goods, bodily by-products, and manufactured products, Rottenberg exposes and playfully transgresses the divisions of race, gender, and geography that underlie the post-Fordist world system".
In Tropical Breeze (2004), champion bodybuilder Heather Foster drives a converted truck that functions as a shop, packaging her sweat.
In the back of the truck, dancer Felicia Ballos pedals a makeshift device, picking up tissues and using gum to stick them to a clothesline, transferring them to Heather, who uses them to collect her sweat for packaging and later for sale.
"[11][12] In Ponytails (2014), a pair of kinetic sculptures, one blonde and one dark-haired, extend and flip frantically through two glory-hole-like openings in separate gallery walls.
[6] Bowls, Balls, Souls, Holes (2014) is a video where bingo, stretching skin, clothespins, a dripping air conditioner, and melting polar ice caps collide in time and space.
"[13] In 2015, her work NoNoseKnows was featured in the Venice Biennale as part of an exhibition curated by Okwui Enwezor: "All the World's Futures."
It follows workers in cramped spaces performing absurd tasks such as crushing lightbulbs, accompanied by a soundtrack of electronic buzzes and blips.
Rottenberg places these scenes in "a kind of superfluous factory of her devising, whose primary product seems to be imagery that's simultaneously pleasurable and queasily troubling.
For their first project, they helped raise money to improve the working conditions at a hand-looming center in Chamba, a north Indian village.
"In a joint statement, the jury members said: "The imaginative video works and installations by Mika Rottenberg intertwine documentary with fiction in surreal allegories of today's life.
[17] In 2018, Rottenberg received the James Dicke Contemporary Artist Prize from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM).
[18] In 2014, Rottenberg received the Ruth Ann and Nathan Perlmutter Artist-in-Residence Award at The Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University.
In 2011, Rottenberg took part in Sommerakademie im Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, curated by Pipilotti Rist at the Planete Doc Film Festival Selection in Warsaw.