The Weight of the Invisible is a two-part exhibition at Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, dedicated to the documentary work of filmmaker and photographer Wang Bing. The exhibition opens on Friday, March 14, 2025, from 6 to 10 pm. Part I of the exhibition will run until May 25, 2025 and will be accompanied by an artist talk with Wang Bing at the Kunstverein on March 15, 2025. In addition, a master class in cooperation with Filmwerkstatt Düsseldorf will take place on March 16.
Wang Bing's films are less concerned with grand events than with the small gestures and everyday acts on which the concrete form and substance of human life rests: he devotes a special kind of attention to the small, the incidental, and the marginal. The Weight of the Invisible focuses primarily on the artist’s most recent film works - including a version of his long-running project Youth - which appear in the second part of the exhibition alongside photographs from his early work. There is no predetermined narrative or directed story in these films - everything we see follows the unpredictable course of what unfolds in front of the camera in real time.
Part II of the exhibition will open on June 6, 2025 with a new selection of works by Wang Bing.
“Wang Bing’s films are more physical than verbal, and even when words are spoken, they seem to hold and hint at something that is difficult or impossible to capture in language – or for which language has been made forbidden and forgotten. Glances, gestures, and moments of hesitation, pausing, and observation often seem to be far more significant and meaningful than what is made explicit. It is through this stoic attentiveness for the silent presence of the body, for the slow passing of the hours, and for the physical details of our surroundings that Wang Bing renders the vulnerability and dignity of human existence visible. Expanding outward from the supposedly banal, his films touch upon the material realities of precarity, state violence, and deprivation. They show the world in a raw, concrete, and physical state – it becomes visible and audible, its weight and resistance tangible. The relationship between the individual and their material environment reveals itself to be complicated and contradictory; at times it is a place of refuge and an accomplice, at others an obstacle, a source of friction and opposition.” – From the website of Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen