Purgatory

The installation Purgatory represents both a physical and spiritual transit space, as it emerges at any time all over the world in diverse configurations – as a border space, a refugee camp, a mobile space, a thought space – for millions of people, who are simultaneously in a state of movement as well as in a state of waiting, departure, escape, hope, despair, happiness; between the place they have left and that of their destiny or longing; on their way home, to a temporary outland or into exile. Ai Weiwei's work at Aedes is an adaptation of the project Bus Shelter he had placed citywide in New York’s public space in 2017 as part of his exhibition Good Fences Make Good Neighbors. The Chinese artist and activist, who himself grew up in exile, complements the installation at Aedes with a selection of large-format portraits of well known refugees – artist, philosopher, scientist – forced out of Germany in the 1930s due to the ideology of the political establishment. More

The exhibition is part of the ANCB programme Borders and Territories: Identity in Place, discussing the spatial consequences of geopolitical, socio-cultural, economic and ecological aspects of home, displacement, migration and identity in a transdisciplinary dialogue. Together with Purgatory, the exhibition City of Refugees by the professors of the University of Houston, Peter J. Zweig and Gail P. Borden, will be shown at Aedes Architecture Forum during the same period. Since ANCB The Aedes Metropolitan Laboratory is a non-subsidised cultural institution, Ai Weiwei will donate this installation and the art sale will be used for further implementing the research programme at ANCB.

Portraits © Ai Weiwei
Quand
31 October 2020, 13:00 to 7 January 2021, 18:30
ANCB The Aedes Metropolitan Laboratory
Christinenstr. 18-19
10119 Berlin
Organisateur
Aedes Architecture Forum
Lien
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