Both global and personal, the title Button Up! is a playful poke at the artist’s ongoing battle with censorship. The exhibition features two new commissions created for the Warehouse space.
- Eight-Nation Alliance Flags is a work of eight flags, each made up of nearly half a million buttons, centred on the early 20th-century invasion of China by the Eight-Nation Alliance. Ai Weiwei bought 30 tonnes of buttons from A Brown & Co Buttons in Croydon when it was closing down in 2019, and 4 million were used to create the flags in China.
- History of Bombs is a toy brick mural featuring life-size models of conventional weapons and weapons of mass destruction. At 25 metres wide and 10 metres high and featuring 3.5 million toy bricks, Factory International describes it as Ai Weiwei’s largest toy brick artwork. It develops an installation first displayed at the Imperial War Museum London in 2020.
Pictures courtesy Factory International / Ai Weiwei
Ai Weiwei:
“Understanding history goes hand in hand with standing up for truth and justice.”
“I’ve never experienced a similar space in my life and that was a challenge, so I studied the history of Manchester, including its role as the world’s first industrial city.”
“I’m not interested in making very big things just for the sake of it. But in Manchester, that wonderful Warehouse space calls for monumental work. Visiting the city for this exhibition – the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution – and reflecting on Britain’s global territorial expansion made me realise I had to explore that history and understand how it connects to the forces driving today’s wars and global crises .”
