Voice to Voice

What does it mean to be valued in a world where the meaning of labor is shifting beneath our feet? How do we understand self-worth when the language of productivity dominates our sense of identity? In Voice to Voice, artist Jingyi Wang opens a space for radical listening—an invitation to pause, to hear, and to feel the human dimensions of work in a time of accelerating change.

 

Spanning video installation, architectural intervention, and live performance, Voice to Voice unfolds as a deeply personal yet systemic exploration of how labor, merit, and self-perception intertwine. Over the course of two years, Wang traveled across Norway and China conducting over 80 in-depth interviews through online recruitment, chance encounter and personal connections within a specially designed mobile pavilion—a temporary, transportable space built for intimate conversations and to protect interviewees’ privacy. These dialogues, shaped by diverse cultural, economic, and social contexts, capture a cross-section of human lives navigating the evolving meaning of work.

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Originally conceived as a research phase for her earlier project JUDGE ME, this work took on new urgency in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic and the concurrent rise of artificial intelligence platforms. The pandemic not only disrupted economies—it altered our collective understanding of labor, care, time, and presence. In parallel, AI technologies began to replace not only manual tasks but increasingly intellectual and creative forms of labor. As these shifts unfold, Wang asks: To what extent do the work and reward systems and ethics, shaped since the Industrial Revolution, still sustain, or instead erode, our capacity for meaningful human activity? And what remains at the center of human value when work, as we’ve known it, becomes unrecognizable?

 

The interviews are presented in six custom-built listening booths installed at Kunsthall 3,14, where twelve selected voices from China are shared in two rotating groupings over the duration of the exhibition. These voices speak not through a didactic framework, but through lived experience: workers, farmers, artists, students, and professionals, members of precariat, entrepreneurs, trust fund inheritors reflect candidly on how work shapes their lives, their relationships, and their self-worth. The installation functions not only as an artwork but as a social space—one where listening becomes an act of attention, empathy, and reflection.

 

A live performance will activate the space further through a public interview between the artist and a Norwegian participant. This performative gesture grounds the project in local context, creating a living dialogue that continues the artist's methodology of blurring the boundary between documentary and performance, between research and encounter.

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Voice to Voice is the third chapter in Wang’s Value Trilogy, a series of “Performative Events” that interrogates the mechanics of how we assign value—both culturally and economically. Following Post Capitalistic Auction (BIT Bergen Internasjonale Teater, 2018), which reimagined the art auction as a critical performance, and JUDGE ME (METEOR Festival, 2021), a performative trial questioning the judgment of art and artists, this latest iteration extends the reflection to the inner architectures of work and identity in broader society. Across the trilogy, Wang stages real-life social structures—auctions, trials, interviews—not to replicate them, but to reconfigure them, revealing how value is constructed, imposed, and sometimes resisted. Voice to Voice is a collaboration between BIT Teatergarasjen’s METEOR festival and Kunsthall 3,14.

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In the context of Kunsthall 3,14’s program, Voice to Voice speaks powerfully to our ongoing engagement with systems of power, labor, and technology. The project asks: If we can no longer measure ourselves by traditional forms of productivity, what other forms of value might emerge? What does a post-utilitarian ethics look like—one that centers care, vulnerability, or relationality, rather than extraction and status?

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In contrast to the accelerated speed of digital technologies and AI-driven processes, Voice to Voice slows down the encounter. It centers the voice not as content to be mined, but as presence to be honored. It frames the act of listening as a form of resistance against invisibility—a space where the subjective, the emotional, and the contradictory can co-exist.

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By amplifying voices that are often overlooked in economic discourse, Wang not only archives a pivotal historical moment; she gestures toward a future in which our worth is not tethered solely to what we produce. In a time when algorithms increasingly define what is seen, heard, and valued, Voice to Voice insists on something else: that human complexity—our doubts, our longings, our uncertainties—is not only worthy of attention, but central to how we move forward.

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Voice to Voice opens with a performance during METEOR festival, and will be on as an exhibition from November 2025 to January 2026 at Kunsthall 3,14. 

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Voice to Voice (performance)

Saturday 15 November 2026
15.00–16.00
Kunsthall 3,14

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Jingyi Wang is an artist and curator based in Norway and China. She studied for a Master’s degree in Performing Arts through the Erasmus Mundus programme from 2011 to 2013. Since 2014, she has worked as an independent performing artist in Norway. Using performance as a framework, her work is characterised by interdisciplinarity and community engagement. 

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Her main works include the STATIC THEATER series – an original concept that composes a time flow with artworks instead of performers on stage – and Performative Event Series:Value Trilogy, in which she draws on real-life social event as references and recreates the rules to push the boundaries between reality and performance, inviting reflection on contemporary social paradigms. 

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Her works have been presented by BIT Bergen Internasjonale Teater (Bergen), Bergen Kunsthall, Kunsthall 3,14 (Bergen), TPAM (Yokohama), Harbourfront Center (Toronto), New Vision Festival (Hong Kong), NLGX Art Festival (Beijing) and ISPA (New York), Arsenale Nord (Venice). She has been an editorial member of TURBA – The Journal of Global Practice of Curating Live Art since 2018, winner of Arte Laguna Prize in 2024. In addition to Performing Arts, she also holds a B.A. in Advertising from Peking University, and a M.A. in Global Communication from the Chinese
University of Hong Kong. 

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Concept: Jingyi Wang 
Directed by: Jingyi Wang
Performers: Jingyi Wang and Kjartan Andersen
Sound: Lars Ove Toft
Light: Lars Ove Toft
Video: Lars Ove Toft (video editing), Ziqian Zhang (camera) and Jun Zhu (camera)
Installation: Øystein Nesheim
Interview wagon: Ziqian Zhang and Jingyi Wang
Dramaturgy: Melanie Fieldseth
Scenography: Lars Ove Toft

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Production: Jingyi Wang 
Tour Management: Jingyi Wang

Co-production: BIT Bergen Internasjonale Teater, Kunsthall 3,14 and Black Box Teater 
Supported by: Art Council of Norway, Bergen Municipality, Association of Image and Sound (FLB) 
In collaboration with: Xin Shi Xiang (Beijing), Fei Musuem (Guangzhou), SWCAC (Shenzhen), and Nan Tou Village (Shenzhen)

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