Summary: Artist Ai Weiwei has installed his latest art piece in the center of Berlin. The famous Konzerthaus was wrapped with over 14,000 discarded life jackets. This was all installed over night as an attempt to show the massive scale of immigrants risking their lives on the seas everyday. The oranges vests were shipped to Germany from Lesbos after Lesbos authorities confirmed they were no longer needed. Ai Weiwei has made several trips to Lesbos, covering the arrivals of battered refugees on his Instagram account. Since 2015 over 400 Syrian refugees have died trying to make the passage to Europe on rafts and over 1 million have attempted the journey. Ai Weiwei has long been a critic of Europe's handling of the immigration and recently made headlines when he posed as Alan Kurdi, a 4 year old refugee who was photographed dead after drowning on a turkish beach.
Analysis: A lot of what Ai Weiwei is doing is like Jacob Riis and his How the Other Half Lives project. Especially with the use of Instagram to spread the photographs to even larger groups of people. Ai Weiwei uses his Instagram to showcase how the other half lives, the groups of people giving up everything to try and cross a sea in an inflatable raft. However, Ai Weiwei goes a step further with public art installations such as the one on the Konzerthaus, creating a larger spectacle to generate headlines. I hope Weiwei's installation and photography projects will generate some sort of positive change to the current treatment of refugees, if not they are at least making the existence of the struggles of refugees un-ignorable.
Source: http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/14/arts/ai-weiwei-berlin-life-jackets/index.html
I really like the synthesis of how this is similar to the art that Riis intended- striking, painful, emotional, hopeful.
ReplyDeleteShara Jeyarajah