"The question of whether Crude Oil by Wang Bing is an installation or a film screening is basically trivial. It is an important and grand work and the label is not that relevant. What is relevant is how an exhausting work like this can best be presented. And how it can live on." —International Film Festival Rotterdam

From November 4 to 8, Triple Canopy and Light Industry present the East Coast premiere of Wang Bing's Crude Oil, a fourteen-hour film installation tracking a fourteen-hour workday of crude-oil extraction in northwest China. Wang's film will be on view from 9 a.m. until 11 p.m. each day, running five times in its entirety.

Accompanying Crude Oil in an adjacent room will be a film program by Matthew Coolidge of the Center for Land Use Interpretation and Lucy Raven (7:30 p.m., Wednesday, November 4; reception to follow), as well as the American premiere of Wang Bing's Coal Money (4 p.m., Saturday, November 7; discussion to follow with NYU professors Rebecca Karl and Zhen Zhang) and a screening of Wang's nine-hour West of the Tracks (12 p.m., Sunday, November 8). A curated DVD library of related films will be available for viewing throughout the week.

Full press release and schedule
Participants
  • Wang Bing is a Chinese documentary filmmaker.
  • Matthew Coolidge
  • Lucy Raven is an artist who works with animation, installation, sound, and the live format of the illustrated lecture. Her films and installations have been shown internationally, most recently in solo exhibitions at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York; Portikus, Frankfurt; and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. She is cofounder, with Victoria Brooks and Evan Calder Williams, of Thirteen Black Cats, a research and production collective. She currently lives and works in New York and teaches at Cooper Union and the School of Visual Arts.
  • Rebecca Karl