Archive for April 2011

On the third of April the Chinese artist and activist Ai WeiWei, probably best known to most people as part of the design team of the 2008 Bejing Olympic stadium, was taken into custody by Chinese authorities at Beijing airport. He is being investigated by the Chinese authorities for tax evasion, bigamy and spreading pornography on the web, according to a Hong Kong newspaper. His whereabouts remain unknown.
Ai’s arrest didn’t come as a surprise. Over the last months, according to civil rights organizations, 200 dissidents, activists, bloggers, lawyers and writers have been arrested, placed under home arrest or warned for speaking their minds. The Chinese government is preparing for an alternation of power and therefore more alert for potential civil unrest. According to Chinese and foreign diplomatic sources the recent civil uprising in the Arabic world and North-Africa also play a role in the fear for civil unrest and thus these arrests. Read more here.

Ai Weiwei intensively uses the internet to communicate with people all over China, especially the young generation. On his blog, off line now, but collected in this book, he criticized everything from sanctioned cruelty to animals to the Chinese-built railroad to Tibet, which he saw as part of an effort to destroy Tibetan culture. When one of the major Internet portals Sina asked Ai to tone it down because China’s Internet police had given them warnings Ai told them: “I will never do self censorship. Either you close it up or I will continue putting those things up.”
A question posted on Facebook about what we, as an arts community, can do to support the safe release of Ai Weiwei sparked great ideas, including one by the Canadian curator Steven Holmes to reenact Ai Weiwei’s project Fairytale: 1001 Qing Dynasty Wooden Chairs, an installation of 1001 late Ming and Qing Dynasty wooden chairs at Documenta 12 in 2007 in Kassel, Germany.

So on April the seventeenth hundreds of supporters brought a chair and peacefully sat in front of Chinese embassies and consulates around the world demanding the artist’s immediate release.

The protest had a special significance for Berlin artists. Ai had intended to open up a studio in the German capital and had an exhibition planned for the end of the month.  Ai’s sister, Gao Ge, doubts the protests will help her brother, but doesn’t think they will make his situation any worse. If Ai will be released I wouldn’t be surprised if he opens that studio in Berlin and never sets a foot in China again.

‘Neither war nor peace’ is the new solo exhibition of the Ukrainian artist Sergey Bratkov. The video ‘Endless war’ and a new series of photographs are an attempt to interpret the last decade, or the so-called noughties. The exhibition is open till May 14th.

The title of the show precisely reflects the mood of the time: “It stands to notice, that we are not in a state between war and peace. It is possible to pose the question about being in a state of ‘neither here nor there’” – considers the artist, showing us its signs through the broken spaces of factories, abandoned flats and in the taped windows of the metro. In this self-formed emptiness, the colours appear brighter and the sounds seem sweeter.   Also see here.

The general notion behind the genre of photography is to fixate history. Sergey Bratkov introduces an aesthetic experience to this documentation of time. Before the artistic conception appears and the free will of the artist is displayed it’s just a blank sheet of photo-paper, which might at some point become a documentation of the present moment. But the supreme goal of photography is to capture and preserve ‘the eternal now’ and ‘ the temporary now’. Similarly Sergey Bratkov’s works go beyond the borders of photography. Everything that the artist narrates is equally related both to our past and our future.

In the depths of our minds we have a collective unconscious. Moreover, the Russian conscience has a mythological nature rather than an historic one, free of borders between past and present (as a Russian I can confirm that). Therefore we are so easily pushed into the realm of myths. It is possible to say that Russia has always been and remains in this state of ‘neither war nor peace’. However this is no longer just the Russian state, it’s universal.
The project ‘neither war nor peace’ is the conceptualization of the idea based on the famous artist’s work ‘ Long live the bad of today for the good of tomorrow’, presented for the first time in 2010. The idea runs through the solidifying state of reality, broken spaces, and the noughties to unfold and turn into hope for the better.