Ai Weiwei has responded after his sculpture, Porcelain Dice, was destroyed throughout an exhibition opening on the Palazzo Fava in Bologna on 20 September, saying he was “shocked’ by the incident.
CCTV footage, posted on Weiwei’s Instagram account, exhibits a person pushing the work over after which holding a bit over his head. In response to CNN, the police in Bologna have arrested a 57-year-old Czech man after he was stopped by the museum’s safety.
“Whatever the motives, I consider that destroying an paintings on show is unacceptable,” Ai Weiwei says. “Such acts not solely undermine the museum’s function as a public house but additionally pose potential bodily threats, past merely damaging the that means an paintings carries.”
The artist was in an adjoining room when the occasion occurred. “I heard a loud, sharp noise—uncommon, virtually like an explosion, with a brittle high quality. At that second, I didn’t suspect it was an paintings being destroyed; it sounded extra like a terrorist assault,” he remembers.
“I rushed inside to seek out chaos. Wanting by means of the glass, I noticed that the Porcelain Dice—crafted from blue-and-white qinghua porcelain—lay shattered on the ground, with safety guards having subdued the individual accountable.”
The artist stresses that he doesn’t really feel safety had been at fault for the incident, or that they may have totally prevented it. “In right this moment’s world, if somebody is decided to destroy one thing, safety measures are sometimes inadequate,” he says.
“Within the CCTV footage, it’s clear that somebody instantly tried to intervene, nevertheless it was too late. Filling museums with safety guards is not a sensible or fascinating resolution both.
“This act raises bigger questions concerning the belief we place in artwork and the best way it’s shared. Such destruction is a mirrored image of the rising divisiveness, irrationality, and violence in society.”
Arturo Galansino, the exhibition’s curator and the director normal of Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, advised Reuters: “Sadly, I do know the creator of this thoughtless gesture from a sequence of disturbing and damaging episodes through the years involving varied exhibitions and establishments in Florence.”
He advised The Artwork Newspaper: “The act of vandalism towards Ai Weiwei’s work Porcelain Dice is much more surprising once we think about that a number of of the works on show discover the theme of destruction itself, such because the triptych Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, 1995 (wherein the artist is depicted destroying an historical vase, referring to the deliberate destruction of the previous in current Chinese language historical past) or the set up Left/Proper Studio Materials (2023) wherein damaged porcelain is displayed, destroyed throughout a demolition in retaliation towards the artist-activist by the Chinese language authorities.”
The Bologna exhibition is “impressed by a dialog between the artist and synthetic intelligence; [it] presents the artist and his inventive universe in a relentless rigidity between custom and experimentation, preservation and destruction”, says a museum assertion. The work was lined and brought away, says a museum spokesperson who provides: “Will probably be changed with a life-size print of the work.”
The destroyed work joins an extended listing of artwork vandalised over the centuries. Diego Velázquez’s The Rest room of Venus, extensively often called ‘The Rokeby Venus’, was famously attacked on the Nationwide Gallery in London by the suffragette Mary Richardson on 10 March 1914, leaving the portray severely broken.
Lately, masterpieces worldwide have additionally been focused by environmental activists, such because the Mona Lisa on the Louvre, which was splattered with soup earlier this 12 months.
