At the SCAD Museum of Art, artist Mika Rottenberg presents her spellbinding work Cosmic Generator, an exploratory architectural installation leading to a single-channel short film that serves as an elaborate allegory. The film follows the exchange of commercial goods through a subterraneous tunnel system that connects an overflowing market in Yiwu, China, with a dollar store and a Chinese restaurant in the U.S.–Mexico border towns of Calexico and Mexicali. Featuring potent textures, hypnotic sounds, and vivid colors that activate the autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR), the film offers a kaleidoscopic view of the everyday absurdities and extreme conditions caused by globalization, geopolitics, and capitalism today. The artist extends the mesmerizing on-screen mise-en-scène into our physical world, inviting viewers to experience her peculiar surreality in multiple dimensions.

Mika Rottenberg, "Cosmic Generator" (still), 2017, single-channel video installation: color with sound, 26 min., 36 sec., dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. © Mika Rottenberg. Commissioned by Skulptur Projekte Münster. Produced with generous support from Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark; Outset Contemporary Art Fund, London; and Polyeco Contemporary Art Initiative, Piraeus, Greece.