Basel is a veritable hotspot for art lovers this season. At the Tinguely Museum, Argentinian artist Mika Rottenberg’s wonderfully chaotic, absurd, and clever video works address ideas of hard and soft power vis-a-vis capitalism, gender dominance, and the natural world. Like Jean Tinguely, Rottenberg satirizes the state of production across a range of materials, in works like Spaghetti Blockchain (2019) and NoNoseKnows (2015), sending up real-life situations like the facilitation of monetary transactions and industrial pearl production in humorous and surreal videos and sculptures.

Why It’s Worth a Look: It is true that, to really appreciate a film by Mika Rottenberg, you’ve got to experience the whole thing, from start to finish. The surreal connections between the strange factory scenes of NoNoseKnows, where the manufacture of pearls is linked, in a dream-like way, to a woman who sneezes plates of Chinese food from her huge nose, is part of the fun. The artist’s brand new video Spaghetti Blockchain conjures associations between “Tuvan throat singers in Siberia, the CERN antimatter factory, a potato farm in Maine, and ASMR-inducing tabletop vignettes.”