When we heard Ai Weiwei was coming to Manchester we rushed to buy tickets for his new exhibition Button Up! at Factory International's Aviva Studios. The show as expected is a spectacle with pieces made in such large scale that it is difficult to photograph - I was grateful for the odd visitor wandering into shot as it gave a sense of the size of the pieces. The most poignant photo is the one I captured of a child standing beneath the largest of the missiles (made to scale!! out of lego) in the History of Bombs artwork and taking in the weight of that colossal weapon of war landing anywhere on earth. Descriptions explain the time it took, 308 volunteers 11 months, to create the piece out of lego which begs a question who built the actual missiles and how long did it take them?
If we had one minor quibble with Button Up! it was that it's sometimes tricky to get a full sense of a single piece. The packed nature of the show meant that whilst looking up and taking in the enormous traditional Chinese temple visitors would occasionally wander into the teahouse exhibit sending tea leaves everywhere. Ideally each piece would have its own room and could be displayed in galleries across Manchester - perhaps this says more for the often minimal budgets given to art. The exhibition is most definitely major value for money as it is absolutely crammed full of important thought provoking art which we wanted to see all of.
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| AI WEIWEI BUTTON UP! | EMILY HAUCK KARIKA NOVA |
images clockwise from the top left: ai weiwei's piece 'history of bombs' depicting 50 of the most powerful bombs humankind has invented - as mentioned above it took 308 volunteers 11 months to create this out of lego, a close up of the lego used to create 'surfing (after hokusai), 'eight-nation alliance flags' made in response to manchester's industrial history referencing the textile factories that made the cities rich - made from a batch of 6000 kinds of buttons weighing 30 tonnes, me narrowly avoiding an accidental wander into the 'teahouse' exhibit, 'law of the journey' a look at the global refugee crisis - the choice of inflatable material is a deliberate reference to the inflatable rubber dinghies often used by refugees, a close up of the buttons used on the flags piece, an overall view of ai weiwei's interpretation of the hokusai great wave piece where the fishing boats are replaced with refugee boats - the original hokusai work can also be seen in manchester this summer at the whitworth gallery - more info here.
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KARIKA NOVA NEWSLETTER
latest in the karika studio, notes in brief:
- rewatching the wizard of oz, research for the school play
- (still) reading richard powers the overstory - it's a long one!
- enjoying how much christine lampard loves greetings cards in this pod episode of sort your life out unpacked
