USA

Weinberg works between text and textiles. Through conversation, collaborative research, and object making, Weinberg produces inter-subjective reference materials that include charts, maps, blueprints, and encyclopedias. Tali Weinberg fuses the languages of text and textiles to address gender violence, the housing crisis, climate change, labor exploitation, and other traumas and insecurities that are experienced at once as social and personal. 

Most of Weinberg works with textiles are created through a long process of observation and study, including communication with female workers from all walks of life and recoding the different temperatures of tapestry made in different places. These works—as structures, systems of knowledge, and the material of everyday life—to create physical and psychological, material and metaphoric, temporal and geographic links between social change and our lives as experienced in our homes and on our bodies. She evokes their social and tactile qualities to link one corporeal body to another, and to link our corporeal bodies to social, political, economic, and ecological bodies.

Bodies on the Line is embroidered with text selected from conversations with other women activists, artists, and scholars. The conversations revolve around question of what it means to put one’s body on the line today.

This series of panels was made in response to the space of the Art Factory in Patterson, NJ—a town built on the manufacture of silk by a labor force of working-class women. Here, women put their bodies on the line for work, at work, and in defense of better work. Assembly lines and the picket lines: on both, women risk safety in order to claim dignity and power. The same is true of the line we walk down the street—risking safety in order to move autonomously through public space. The women of Patterson’s silk mills may be distant from us in space and time. But women continue to find and put their bodies on the line in all of these senses, in ways that make our relation to them, and other far-off times and places, intimate。