Countdown to Christmas
14 - Awareness of the Past
- The current state of our world cannot be understood without knowledge of the past. It is important to disseminate the very information and knowledge that authoritarian or totalitarian governments want to hide.
- Art can play an important role in creating awareness of the past and its impact on the present. It opens up access to destinies and contexts, it can evoke emotions and inspire individual action. It is a means of overcoming oblivion and making fates visible.
- At the same time, history is not unambiguous. Almost everyone agrees that lessons must be learned from history, but they have very different opinions about what exactly can and must be learned.
The Chinese artist Ai Weiwei created this work in 2014, when he was still under house arrest imposed by the Chinese regime after he was imprisoned in 2011. The work draws attention to the fate of people around the world who have been imprisoned for these actions or still are. This is done using a widespread and well-known building material - more than a million Lego bricks. This creates a global association between the individual portraits. Viewers can move between the individual portraits. The artwork was shown for the first time on the former prison island of Alcatraz in San Francisco.
