Opening: Friday, March 14, 2025, 6–10 pm

The Weight of the Invisible is a two-part exhibition dedicated to the documentary work of the filmmaker and photographer Wang Bing (b. 1967 in Xi’an, China, lives in Paris). While Wang Bing’s films are epic in their length and their historical and political scope, they 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. The artist devotes a special kind of attention to the small, incidental, and marginal – one that knows that existential weight does not necessarily lie in the obvious, but rather in the in-between, in the interstitial, in the enduring, and in what accumulates.

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.

The Weight of the Invisible focuses on Wang Bing’s newest film works – among them a version of his long-standing project Youth, newly conceived as an installation for the Kunstverein – which appear in the second part of the exhibition alongside photographs from his early body of work. There is no predefined narration, no directed story, in these films – everything we see follows the movements and unpredictable course of what unfolds in front of the camera in real time. As Wang Bing puts it: “For me, a story doesn’t belong to this or that literary or cinematographic tradition, but to people’s life” (from „Conversations with Wang Bing“, Piretti Editore, 2024, p. 34). Thus, minutes, days, months, and years pass in which his whole attention is dedicated to the individuals he is portraying, and in which the camera does nothing more than listen, watch, and record. The deliberate absence of any script is the result of an artistic method in search of a non-hierarchical, open, and direct narrative form, able to approach the uncertainty and complexity of human experience with care and sensitivity. This might be an act of artistic resistance; against the violently enforced image of (Chinese) national unity, for instance, which Wang Bing’s films bring into question by the immense geographical fragmentation of their locations alone.

Wang Bing’s connection to the world as a filmmaker, which simultaneously describes an ethical and political stance, manifests itself in the way in which he abandons control and delivers himself to life as it appears before him. His work is an attempt to get as close as possible to material reality, without commenting on it or pre-defining its direction. It is particularly in the duration and temporal dimension of his films that this dedication reveals itself: duration becomes density here, an almost physical mass that describes a sort of embodied cinema and a way of being in the world that is based on the elementary, granular, and corporeal.

The exhibition will be accompanied by an artist talk with Wang Bing at the Kunstverein on March 15, 2025, and a master class organized in cooperation with the Filmwerkstatt Düsseldorf will be held on March 16, 2025 (registration required). Simultaneous interpretation into English will be provided for both events.

Part II of the exhibition will open on June 6, 2025 with a new selection of works by Wang Bing.

Curated by Kathrin Bentele

Our special thanks go to Wang Bing’s longstanding collaborator and producer, Lihong Kong.

The exhibition is funded by Kunststiftung NRW, Institut Français Deutschland / Bureau des arts plastiques, Kunst- und Kulturstiftung der Stadtsparkasse Düsseldorf, Sparkassen-Kulturstiftung Rheinland, and Trampoline, Association in support of the French art scene, Paris.