A11Y

The People’s Currency (07.02.2017)

(Exhibition, News, Performance, Photography)

15 – 19 February 2017, daily 8am – 8pm
Preview: 14 February 2017, 5 – 8pm
Free participatory performance
Flinders Street Amphitheatre
Federation Square, Melbourne

Premiere of a major performance commissioned by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art for Asia TOPA Asia-Pacific Triennial of Performing Arts

The People’s Currency takes its name from renminbi (China’s currency) and explores the social impacts of globalisation on those who seek their fortunes in the factories of China – or the ‘workshop of the world’. When almost everything is now ‘Made in China’, how are we all implicated as consumers, in the labour conditions of the production line? Dressed as a gold Mao-suited ‘ambassador’, will preside over a ‘factory’ of workers. The public is invited to enter into short-term ‘employment’ on the factory floor. The People’s Currency turns a site in Melbourne’s CBD into ‘Renminconn’, a closed loop ‘special economic zone’. In Lim’s project, mass-production and money-printing become strategies for contemplating the human impact of the ‘long march’ of global capitalism.

This performance is part of the inaugural Asia TOPA festival, produced with the assistance of Pegasos5 and is supported by Federation Square and the City of Melbourne.