Manchester
Ai Weiwei - Button Up!
History, power and empire collide in Button Up! – a major new exhibition from the world-leading artist and activist Ai Weiwei
Internationally renowned artist and activist Ai Weiwei turns his critical gaze to the last 200 years of global history with this major new exhibition. Monumental in scale and ambition, Ai Weiwei: Button Up! is the artist’s most expansive presentation in the North to date.
Ai Weiwei is known around the world for his uncompromising artistic vision and political activism. From a childhood in exile to surviving secret detention in China, his remarkable life and career have led him to global prominence. Using sculpture, installation, film, photography and architecture, his work is unafraid to ask urgent, critical questions.
In Button Up!, the artist turns his lens on two centuries of Chinese and British relations. Taking inspiration from Manchester, a city at the heart of the Industrial Revolution, Button Up! explores how historic systems of trade, empire and exploitation resonate in today’s humanitarian and political crises.
Conceived as a total environment, Ai Weiwei: Button Up! brings together new and existing large-scale works on display in the UK for the first time. The monumental installation features porcelain, cotton, glass, bronze and even buttons and toy bricks. Each material contains a story of human invention and consumption. Together, they paint a picture of globalisation.
Both global and personal, the title Button Up! is a playful poke at the artist’s ongoing battle with censorship. The exhibition also features the world premiere of a new body of work created especially for the vast spaces of the Warehouse – Eight-Nation Alliance Flags made from millions of buttons, as well as a new version of History Of Bombs made entirely from toy bricks.
The new commissions sit alongside large-scale works by the artist which are going on show in the UK for the first time: Law of the Journey (2017), a 47m long inflatable migrant boat containing hundreds of human figures and the artist’s largest artwork to date; Wang Family Ancestral Hall (2015), a Ming dynasty ancestral temple reassembled from 1,500 individual wooden pieces; and La Commedia Umana (2017-21), a black Murano glass chandelier made up of over 2,000 pieces and weighing nearly 3 tonnes. Also on show is Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads (2010), a re-envisioning of the twelve animals of the Chinese zodiac.
Button Up! immerses visitors in Ai Weiwei’s fearless interrogation of the forces past and present that drive today’s injustices – while championing art’s enduring power to challenge and inspire.
Ai Weiwei - Button Up! Tickets
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