Punctures | Wang Bing’s Bitter Money

Wednesday, September 25, 2019, 7pm
$7 General, $5 Members, free for ArtsAccess pass holders

Wang Bing’s celebrated Bitter Money (2016) follows a handful of workers in the city of Huzhou, home to 18,000 clothing factories. Capturing them both at work—where they may labor for more than 12 hours a day—and in their off-hours, this demanding, rewarding film incisively captures the conditions of the contemporary textile industry.

Wang Bing, Bitter Money, 152 minutes, digital video, 2016

Bing has an unreal talent for finding precisely the right way to frame candid moments. —Hyperallergic

Wang’s camera captures the relentless hopelessness of the Chinese low-income working class, not for us to gawk at, but for us to experience, to become a part of it, and to maybe also understand it.—Frameland

This screening is part of Punctures: Textiles in Digital and Material Time. Consisting of three exhibitions and public programs that weave into each other, Punctures features artists who are invested in the intersections and history of textile practices, media art, and critical and liberatory politics, including trans fashion and domesticity; gendered and immigrant labor under global racial capitalism; Gelede women’s commemoration, protest and power as represented in textile work; speculative future-casting through Oglala Lakota knowledge systems, and more. The exhibition features installations by Betty Yu, Cecilia Vicuña, Charlie Best, Eniola Dawodu, Kite, and Sabrina Gschwandtner, performances by Charlie Best, Jodi Lynn Maracle, and Kite, and screenings of work by Jodie Mack, Pat Ferrero, Sabrina Gschwandtner, and Wang Bing. Punctures design by Kelly Walters.

Image: Wang Bing, Bitter Money (2016). Special thanks to Icarus Films.