Taste
5x State of the Art
Art as indictment, nature as witness and colliding wheelchairs as painful symbols of miscommunication. What if art no longer only inspires, but also confronts? The art of protest Last year, Kunsthal Rotterdam presented an impressive overview of Ai Weiwei under the title In Search of Humanity. As an artist and human rights activist, Ai Weiwei cuts hot issues […]
Art as an accusation, nature as a witness and colliding wheelchairs as a painful symbol of miscommunication. What if art no longer only inspires, but also confronts?
The art of protest
Last year, Kunsthal Rotterdam presented an impressive overview of Ai Weiwei under the title In Search of HumanityAs an artist and human rights activist, Ai Weiwei addresses hot-button issues and criticizes authoritarian systems of power. The exhibition offered an impressive overview of his career spanning more than four decades from 1979 to the present. For example, there were six dioramas showing the artist during his solitary confinement in a Chinese prison in 2011. You also saw the famous photo of the raised finger in front of Tiananmen Square, urns from the Han Dynasty decorated with the Coca-Cola logo, and twelve replicas of statues – partly fantasy – from the zodiac of the Zodiac fountain that was built for the summer palace of the Chinese emperor. And there was much more: paintings, cultural readymades, LEGO works, impressive sculptures, and video art. As a visitor, you got a fascinating picture of the life of Ai Weiwei, his early youth that he spent in exile with his father, and his artistic development that began in China and continued in the Western world. His work is a sharp protest against the threats to freedom of expression and human rights worldwide.
In conversation with nature
In addition to the worldwide appreciation for its Van Gogh collection, the Kröller Müller Museum also receives great appreciation for its nature-related art collection. In the exhibition Seeing the forest through the trees last year, artworks by four artists were on display who look at the relationship between man and nature in different ways in their work. Eija-Liisa Ahtila was one of them. In the video work she presented APRIL ≈ 61°01′ 24°27′ she enters into an intimate conversation with nature. This is an 8-channel moving image installation that is divided over two spaces. The installation reflects on the spatiality of a forest area by projecting the images onto a rectangular wall. The source of the work is life in a forest where every living being, except humans, is an integrated element of the whole. The work was recorded over a period of two years in a wooded nature reserve, where the forest could exist without human intervention. The artist clearly distanced himself from anthropocentric worldviews; the living forest is autonomous and stands completely on its own.
Desert as canvas
For their site-specific installation in the desert of Coachella Valley, Sara Alissa and Nojoud Alsudairi designed a temporary route that traces and constructs human and non-human interactions between elements in the surrounding nature. This land art project was named When the Earth Began to Look at Itself, and is intended to draw the attention of the spectators to the ecological transition and physical geography of the desert location. Their spectacular installation was part of Desert X AlUla 2024. Based on a more poetic criterion of time, memory, materiality and occupation, the artists believe that this form of intervention heightens and intensifies our awareness of the surrounding landscape and its ecology. It becomes a place of meaning and contemplation.
Colliding wheelchairs
Old People's Home consists of thirteen life-size human replicas of army generals, religious and political leaders of different nationalities. The dolls wear traditional costumes that reflect their importance. They all sit in electric wheelchairs, which automatically change direction when they bump into each other or the wall. In this moving installation, Chinese artists Sun Yuan and Peng Yu have hyperrealistic human replicas in wheelchairs stare at something in the distance; they nod their heads or simply take a nap. In fact, they are constantly moving and bumping into each other incessantly, but their faces remain emotionless, creating an atmosphere of indifference. Are they elderly people who are used as a metaphor for death? In any case, the installation shows the absurdity of the optimistic belief in the possibilities for mutual communication between different cultures or groups. In this powerful work, the artist duo tries to tell us that the lack of communication is not due to the irreversibility of death, but is caused by the structure of the societies in which these people have lived for a long time. Although the installation dates from 2007, it is still shown here and there in China and Europe.
World under water
South African photographer, artist and activist Gideon Mendel is based in London. His work focuses on contemporary social issues of global importance. His work as a 'struggle photographer' during the last years of Apartheid in the 1980s first brought him to attention. He is currently concerned with global warming and the many floods and bushfires it has caused. His most recent photo series Drowning World which was shown in September 2024 in a large format (5 x 5 meters) at Palazzo Rettorato in Turin, can certainly be called impressive. It is his attempt to create an intimate and systematic typology of our global climate crisis. In this photo installation he showed that the consequences of climate change transcend all boundaries of wealth, class, race and geography. He began the series in 2007 by photographing two floods: one in the United Kingdom and a second in India. Since then he has visited and photographed many flood zones around the world. He sees his work as an indictment of a global political system that has proven incapable of taking meaningful action, because big business, farmers and governments resist the necessary measures to reduce carbon emissions.
