Venice
Ai Weiwei was a strong presence at the 55th Venice Biennale, all but dominating the collateral events. You could leave his exhibitions, but you couldn’t stop thinking about them. The German pavilion hosted Bang, a forest of 886 piled-up wooden stools. These three-legged seats have been used in China for centuries, though aluminum and plastic replaced wood after the Cultural Revolution. An expanded version of Straight (first shown at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC, in 2012) covered the floor of the Zuecca Project Space in the Complesso delle Zitelle. The rebar lengths that form the installation—150 ton’s worth—were recovered from schools destroyed in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, when more than 5,000 children died… see the entire review in the print version of January/February’s Sculpture magazine.
