In the spring of 2011, just after his release from illegal detention in Beijing, I interviewed Ai Weiwei about the 81 days he had spent inside. Now that he was “free”, I asked him, would he return to work? After all he was one of the lucky ones: many people who were arrested at the same time as Ai have not been heard of since. Surely he would now give up art and activism and go and lead a quiet life?
“All the time I was inside,” said Ai, “I thought that if ever I get out I will stop all this – I will just go and sit on a beach. But then a day after I was released, a human rights lawyer friend who had also been detained and tortured came to my door. Under the terms of my bail, I was not allowed to meet this man, but there he was outside on the street. I couldn’t turn him away. And also I couldn’t just forget about all those people who were still inside. I will have to carry on.”
Ai Weiwei has been as good as his word. The mammoth work now on display in the Church of Sant’Antonin in Venice is the product of the two years that have passed since he was released. The work is made up of six black shoulder-high iron boxes, each one about 5 metres by 3 metres and weighing 2.5 tonnes. The boxes occupy the nave of the church, which has been cleared of pews. At first glance, the containers appear to be hermetically sealed boxes, or perhaps even lumps of solid black iron. There is something deeply, viscerally unsettling about their brooding presence in the church, their heaviness and scale.