Bing Lin + Gunta Kaza
MFA ’16 DMI
“Somewhere every culture has an imaginary zone for what it excludes, and it is that zone we must try to remember today.”
—Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clemente
We present a clothesline of multiple dishcloths collected over time, with their stories brought to life through video projection. The video is a documentary filmed and edited by Gunta Kaza, Professor Emerita of Massachusetts College of Art and Design. These dishcloths are metaphorical portraits of caregivers from around the world, of different nationalities, religions, races and social classes. They evoke the passage of time, with their stories to tell.
Walking in and around this community of common dishcloths, we may catch a familiar scent of baked bread, mild detergent soap, perhaps a musty smell that harkens to a lived experience. Lives that remain hidden until revealed in this collective. With each cloth comes a memory, a collection of experiences and evidence of a life.
This installation honors our mothers, grandmothers, daughters, sisters, neighbors, students, teachers, and all who participate in giving of themselves to enhance the lives of those around them. These cloths engage the onlooker with stories of time gone by, of events and mundane activities, the forgotten past. Remembrance reveals memory and association.
This project is a collaboration between Gunta Kaza and Bing Lin, and many others, as part of the collection, and possibly you. We invite our audience to submit images of their own cloth stories on our website: mutemusemutiny.com
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Bing Lin is a visual designer, multimedia artist, and educator with a passion for music visualization and cross-cultural artistic exchange. She holds an MFA in Design from the Dynamic Media Institute at Massachusetts College of Art and Design and she has taught graphic design courses at the university level in the US, India, and China. She has performed with a variety of world music ensembles, including Javanese Gamelan, West African Drumming and Dance, and the Albanian Balkan Ensemble. Bing is always eager to collaborate across disciplines, creating meaningful connections through art, music and design.
Gunta Kaza, Professor Emerita and artist currently teaches in the Integrative Sciences and Biological Arts Department (ISBA) at the Massachusetts College of Art & Design, where she taught undergraduate and graduate design courses for many years. Gunta received a PsyaD in 2019 from the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis (BGSP), Brookline, and a M.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design. Since 2010 she established a private psychoanalytic practice and is particularly interested in the roles that narcissism and aggression play in the intersection between art/design and psychoanalysis.
