Ai Weiwei Breeds High Culture With Lego to Rebirth Readymades @ neugerriemschneider in Berlin

know thyself, Ai Weiwei’s fifth solo exhibition with nerugerriemschneider, continues his extended engagement with imagery created from Lego bricks to reassess, de- and reconstruct or contextualize anew works from throughout art history and the contemporary media landscape. Using a traditionally playful, immediate, generationally and geographically ubiquitous medium to analytical, critical extents, Ai shapes a veritable survey of both the Western cultural canon and of his own artistic trajectory.

Throughout his body of work Ai has returned to Lego bricks time and again, laboriously harnessing pieces by the hundreds of thousands to interrogate the parameters of imagemaking and production, honing his use of the material and expanding its representational and theoretical capacities to shape facsimiles of well-known works of art and other popular media. Honoring Marcel Duchamp and his legacy of the readymade, Ai deploys the mass-produced objects for adaptations of preexisting motifs, translating and often modifying them within his own social and political contexts, the angular components mimicking the pixels that coalesce to become today’s digital, widely and infinitely distributed imagery.

 
 

know thyself is on view through March 30th, 2024, at neugerriemschneider, Christinenstrasse 18-19, 10119 Berlin.

PRIVACY Exhibition at Schirn Kunsthalle

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Private—a word from the past, or so it would seem these days. A word of hardly any relevance in an era when everything—from one’s favorite recipe to one’s current relationship status—is posted on Facebook. Exhibitionism, self-disclosure, the delight in telling stories, showing off, and voyeurism are the social strategies in today’s world—a world that has long since undergone a structural transformation of the public sphere. In contemporary art, domestic scenes and personal secrets are mirrored in photographs, Polaroids, cell phone photos, objects, installations, and films. The familiar and intimate are put in the picture. Through a consideration of numerous contemporary approaches the Schirn investigates the dwindling private sphere and the “publicness of the intimate.” Aiming her camera through a rear courtyard window, Merry Alpern captures blurred scenes of hurried sexual encounters; in his romantic video piece Akram Zaatari explores an online chat between two men; and Fiona Tan combines private snapshots from different countries to create large tableaux. The exhibition undertakes memorable excursions to the fragile borders between the self and the other. Other artists include Dash Snow, Mark Morrisroe, Ai Weiwei and Marilyn Minter. Privacy will be on view from November 1, 2012, to February 3, 2013 at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Romberg, 60311 Frankfurt

Ai Weiwei: Interlacing

Ai Weiwei – Interlacing is the first major exhibition of photographs and videos by Ai Weiwei. It foregrounds Ai Weiwei the communicator – the documenting, analyzing, interweaving artist who communicates via many channels. Ai Weiwei already used photography in his New York years, but especially since his return to Beijing, he has incessantly documented the everyday urban and social realities in China, discussing it over blogs and Twitter. Photographs of radical urban transformation, of the search for earthquake victims, and the destruction of his Shanghai studio are presented together with his art photography projects, the Documenta project Fairytale, the countless blog and cell phone photographs. A comprehensive book accompanies this exhibition. Ai Weiwei – Interlacing is on view at the Jeu de Paume in Paris from February 21, 2012 to April 29, 2012.

Ai Weiwei's New York Photographs

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Asia Society Museum in New York presents an exhibition of 227 photographs taken by famed Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei, capturing the history, culture, and atmosphere of 1980s New York from his unique perspective. The exhibition marks the first time Ai Weiwei's New York Photographs series is being shown outside of China. On view until August 14. www.asiasociety.org