Venice: Church of Sant’Antonin - Ai
Weiwei – Disposition exhibitions. The artist's only major new solo shows in 2013, are on show across
two locations in Venice. Above in the Church of Sant’Antonin, Ai Weiwei’s
project S.A.C.R.E.D., until September 15 and in the Zuecca Project Space is his
Straight exhibition. S.A.C.R.E.D., is a new site-specific presentation, curated
by Maurizio Bortolotti for the Venice Biennale at the Church of Sant'Antonin,
offering an immediate sense of the drama of an event which underlines the
contradictory development of contemporary China. In 2011 Ai Weiwei was
imprisoned for eighty-one days in a secret location and here, for the first
time, describes the experience of those days in prison and the continuous
obsessive surveillance. The project
consists of six metal containers, inside which, key moments of the everyday
life of the artist during his imprisonment.
Church of Sant’Antonin - Ai
Weiwei. The six episodes of life in prison are the representation, in the form
of dioramas inside each container, of different moments of the prisoner’s day.
The containers have small
openings through which the visitors can observe individual scenes.
Church of Sant’Antonin - Ai
Weiwei. The precision of the details and the painstaking reproduction of the
spaces pass through the powerful filter of the artist’s memory, which seems to
relive instant after instant in the project, without anguish but with lucid
determination. The works are an
effective description of the system of high-proximity surveillance deployed by
the detention system to which the artist was subjected.
Church of Sant’Antonin - Ai Weiwei.
The titles of the individual dioramas, also point to the relationship they
establish with the religious place that hosts them, from the general idea of
the ‘sacred’ indicated in the title, to that of ‘ritual’ and ‘renewal’,
concluding with the less religious concepts of ‘entropy’ and ‘doubt'.
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