Visiting professor at the University of Arts: Huge interest in Ai Weiwei Berlin premiere – Tagesspiegel

01/11/2015 22:21 clock From Caroline Fetscher <- inteaserpicposition: 1 -> <- self.position:! 1 -> <- classid: hcf center -> <- position: center -> <- inisprint: false -> <- inhaspic: true ->

Before rappelvollem Hall enters its Ai Weiwei visiting professor at the Berlin University of the Arts in. At the welcome evening, the audience experienced an equally shy as quick-witted artist.

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Even if you lot could have experience with art, they do not define it, Ai Weiwei says the desire that he should give a definition. “This is like having sex. Since I also have a lot of experience, but wants him to define not yet. “Says Ai Weiwei. He harvests pleased laughter from the audience. Basically, the impression that he may not like to have anything define extemporaneously before more than a thousand people. Especially not his subject, his cause, art. The produced in the head and in the studio, in free communication with the world, can read the message. Vacuum and on display, what can you say there.

Ai Weiwei, concept artists, filmmakers, critics of the regime, an environmental activist, was sitting in 2011 at an unknown location in custody when he was appointed a member of the Berlin Academy of Arts. China’s authorities accused him of tax evasion, among other things. After two months in prison, he was not allowed to leave the country for four years. Now the 59-Järige will teach and work for three years in Berlin, at the University of the Arts (UdK). Here comes China’s most famous contemporary artists to the financed for him by the Einstein Visiting Professorship. Since 2011 she had been kept open in the hope of his appearance for him.

Now it is here, now he is welcomed. Late Sunday afternoon had the Faculty of Ai – the first name is the family name in China – a podium arranges: “In conversation with Ai Weiwei”. To “the art of teaching art” it’ll go, promised Martin Rennert, president of the University of Arts in their rappelvollem Concert Hall at Zoo Station to the public. 1250 seats to the hall (and about 16,000 more people look via live stream on the net). At the entrance to park police cars, a couple of security guards take care of the protection of diplomats, in the first rows of lively Berlin’s cultural variables.

Ai Weiwei history romp from the reeducation camp

Most of all, it seemed that they had the same all sat with him on the podium, the lucky Berlin Interim colleagues of the world famous Chinese. Flanked this is from a communications theorist, a video artist, a philosophy professor and a choreographer and dancer. Beside him he didnt sit sympathetic interpreter whispering English and Chinese in his ear. Ai himself speaks on the night English.

For the art of teaching art there is then barely, but the four pulse on stage have made touching trouble so, Ai Weiwei’s life stages as in the current talk shows with small Einspielern and by PowerPoint projected onto a large screen photos to illustrate symbolically. They also have some of the items pictured here physically, and plant them in front of the astonished artist. – A small globe as a quote in the subject reduction or abundance, more or less, two beverage cans in allusion to Andy Warhol and Ai Weiwei decade as a young man in New York, where he found his first teacher in the painter Sean Scully. A photo of Scully as a young man appears on the screen.

Then, a brick is placed in front of him, a bright red block. What he meant what he could report it? Ai, always polite and friendly, told as expected the story of that he made at the age of ten such Bauziegel – in the Laogai, the re-education camp, where his father Ai Qing lived during the prescribed “Cultural Revolution” in exile, a writer who does not fit China’s leadership. The father was as old as Ai Weiwei now, and physical labor not used to. 400 stones per day had to produce everyone there. Some of the work had then taken the son for the father – and does it in his own way well until today. Therefore, he knows everything, the mud, the dust, hauling, burning the stones, the cool, everything. He did not need to study architecture, building houses is so gone to him by the hand. “Some I have sixty houses built.”

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