On the occasion of Patty Chang: Touch Archive, BANK NYC invites you to a special screening of Milk Debt (2020) and We Are All Mothers (2022), followed by a virtual Q&A discussion with the artist, Patty Chang.

Milk Debt is a video installation featuring lists of fears solicited from an open call in Hong Kong and the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic. The lists are read by nursing mothers pumping their breast milk in Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Santa Monica, and the US/Mexico border. Breast milk, as a life-giving substance and hormonal medium for binding an infant to its mother, serves as a powerful metaphor for the importance of empathy and collectivity in times of crisis.

We Are All Mothers is a video essay and installation developed out of Chang’s research project, Learning Endings, created in collaboration with cultural theorist Astrida Neimanis and veterinary pathologist Aleksija Neimanis. We Are All Mothers emerged from pandemic-era virtual meetings where the three researchers conducted and observed harbor porpoise necropsies—dissections performed to determine the animals’ cause of death. The project layers scientific, artistic, and theoretical perspectives to investigate communal mourning, the passage of intergenerational trauma, and approaches to multispecies care and repair.

This event occurs concurrently with Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie at the Metropolitan Museum, which features two of Chang’s early video works, Melons (At A Loss) (1998) and Fountain (1999), as well as a newly commissioned sculpture by the artist.

Screening + Q&A with Patty Chang