Ai Weiwei – Visual artist and filmmaker

What is the significance of politically engaged art? How has the relationship between art and politics developed? And what role do new media play? Using images and film clips from media art, video and film works by Ai Weiwei, these questions will be discussed in the film exploratory with Wolfgang Petroll (film lecturer at ZAK, KIT).

Ai Weiwei is one of China's most prominent conceptual artists and political dissidents today. In video works he has documented the rapid social change in his home country China since 2003, but also the bureaucracy's handling of the earthquake catastrophe in Sichuan on May 12, 2008 and its consequences. The authorities reacted with work restrictions, arrests and bans on leaving the country.

In 2017, Ai Weiwei appeared with a feature film for the first time: The documentary »Human Flow« deals with the »flow of people«, the worlwide migration triggered by globalization, economic inequality, political crises, wars and power struggles, a humanitarian catastrophe that forces us to implement concepts such as interculturality and transculturality more strongly than before.