The Chinese language artist and activist Ai Weiwei will open his first exhibition in India this week on the New Delhi gallery Nature Morte.
Working from 15 January to 22 February, the as-yet-untitled present contains works from throughout 4 many years of Ai’s profession. Amongst them are his large-scale Lego works primarily based on well-known artworks, together with variations of Browsing (After Hokusai) and Water Lilies, a reinterpretation of Monet’s triptych of the identical title. To mark his India debut, he may also present new Lego works primarily based on Pichwais, intricate fabric work depicting devotional Hindu topics, in addition to homages to the nation’s storied Modernist painters V.S. Gaitonde and S.H. Raza.
All works within the present are on the market, with a quantity having been pre-sold, Nature Morte’s co-director Aparajita Jain tells The Artwork Newspaper.
On present for the primary time is the set up Whitewashed Remnants of Historical past of the State of Rising Future Works, for which the artist has painted over domestically sourced antiques together with chairs and vases. F.U.C.Ok. (2024), for which Ai has sewed metallic buttons onto 4 navy stretchers to spell out the titular expletive, can be being exhibited. This work was the centrepiece of his present at Lisson gallery in London final 12 months.
“That is my first exhibition in India… though there are solely a dozen of my artworks, it covers a number of key factors that hint greater than 20 years—and nearly 30 years—of my artistic exercise,” Ai stated in a press release.
Though that is Ai’s first solo exhibition within the nation, his work has beforehand been proven at India Artwork Truthful in New Delhi, by his galleries Lisson, Continua and Neugerriemschneider. Nature Morte, which doesn’t symbolize Ai, is collaborating with Continua to stage the exhibition at its Dhan Mill location in southern New Delhi.
Work that ‘speaks to the current second’
All through his profession, Ai has been vocal in opposition to situations of censorship and repression. His criticism of the Chinese language authorities noticed him arrested in Beijing in 2011 and held captive for 81 days.
India is presently witnessing a rising tide of censorship from its far-right authorities, which is primarily concentrating on journalists and activists. A current report by the impartial media watchdog Free Speech Collective notes the “alarming disintegration of free speech safety in India”, and information greater than 11,000 situations of censorship final 12 months.
“Bringing Ai’s work to India isn’t about making a spectacle—for us, it’s about urgency,” Jain says. “His work speaks to the current second with whole readability: historical past, energy, borders, reminiscence. India is a spot the place these questions are lived, not summary, and this exhibition invitations that dialog with out flinching.”
Peter Nagy, co-director of Nature Morte, provides: “Ai Weiwei has an unmatched capability to carry the traditional and the modern in the identical body—craft and critique, magnificence and blunt reality. Presenting his first solo present in India feels each overdue and important, particularly now, when the politics of photos, motion, and belonging are shaping lives all over the place—together with right here.”
