Overview
- Ai Weiwei has installed his largest site-specific exhibition in the hanger-like Warehouse at Aviva Studios, filling the space with new Manchester commissions and major earlier works.
- The show features Eight‑Nation Alliance Flags, eight huge banners sewn from about four million buttons bought from a closed Croydon factory, foregrounding links between textile manufacture and imperial history.
- A 25m × 10m History of Bombs mural made from 3.5 million toy bricks depicts weapons at play and was assembled with volunteers in Manchester and craftspeople in China.
- The artist will present a first-time, 24-hour performance reenacting his 2011 detention on Friday with audiences watching him eat, sleep, exercise and be interrogated.
- The exhibition frames industrialisation, Britain–China relations and censorship through personal memory and memorial works such as the sound piece Nian Nian, which names thousands of Sichuan earthquake victims.