Ai Weiwei: Sewing a Button at Aviva Studios
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Ai Weiwei: Sewing a Button
Always double check opening hours with the venue before making a special visit.
For 24 hours at Aviva Studios, Ai Weiwei will place himself back inside a room that once governed every aspect of his daily life.
Sewing a Button is a live performance work based on the artist’s secret detention by Public Security in China in 2011. Held for 81 days without formal charges, Weiwei lived under constant surveillance in a single cell, eating, washing, exercising and sleeping between intense interrogations. Here, that experience is condensed into a single night and day. Beginning at 5pm on 3 July, audiences are invited to bear witness as Weiwei recreates his confinement.
Sewing a Button turns observation into the medium itself, with visitors able to book into two-hour slots to watch Weiwei eat, write, wash, rest and endure interrogations. CCTV cameras will also transmit footage from inside the cell onto screens around Aviva Studios, while a global audience can tune into an online feed of the performance. The idea is to replicate the conditions of surveillance under which he was originally held, with the audience granted the same view as his real-life guards. It’s both an unflinching insight into his detention and an exploration of the strange violation of being watched.
As a companion piece to the major exhibition Button Up! opening at Aviva Studios this summer, Sewing a Button brings the same concerns down to human scale. Where the exhibition examines the legacies of British imperialism, global trade and state power through monumental installation, this performance distils those histories into something uncomfortably intimate. Vast systems become a single room. Politics becomes a body.
The title comes from a small but piercing detail. After two months of detention without a button to hold up his trousers, a guard finally brought Weiwei a needle and thread. It’s an image that captures something essential in his work: the way huge structures of power can make themselves felt through ordinary objects, suddenly weighted with meaning.
Weiwei has returned to this period before in film and installation, but Sewing a Button marks the first time he has re-enacted it live. Presented across a full 24 hours, it sustains attention on one man’s endurance, and, beyond it, on how little separates freedom from its loss.
