Bicycle Thieves

Paying tribute to the Italian neorealist film “Ladri di Bicilette” (bicycle thieves) in which a worker spends all his family savings to buy the bicycle needed for a new job but ends up losing the bike at the hands of a thief on his first day of work, “Bicycle Thieves” extends the film’s concept to a contemporary context and highlights individuals’ precarious status within increasingly tricky relations to various institutions and systems.
Whether in post-World War II Italy or post-internet China, bicycles epitomise the relationships between humans and the technical object as means of production: the show tackles the relations between labour and technology in digital economies, within the service sector, domestic work and contemporary art.