Ai Weiwei turns detention into performance again in Manchester
Ai Weiwei (b. 1957) is returning to one of the most difficult subjects in his practice with a new 24-hour performance in Manchester. This summer, the Chinese artist and dissident will present Sewing a Button at Factory International’s Aviva Studios as part of his site-specific exhibition Button Up!, a project that places his own history of state surveillance at the center of a larger meditation on Britain and China.
The performance is scheduled to begin at 5 p.m. on July 3 and continue until July 4. It will unfold inside a recreation of the cell where Ai was held for 81 days by China’s Ministry of Public Security. The reconstructed space measures 7.2 meters by 3.6 meters, and visitors will be able to reserve two-hour viewing slots or purchase a full 24-hour ticket that allows them to come and go. Some footage will also be broadcast online.
According to the exhibition materials, Sewing a Button will show Ai sleeping, eating, exercising, writing, washing, and being interrogated, while three CCTV cameras allow viewers to watch him in the same detached way guards once could. The setup sharpens the work’s psychological pressure: the performance is not simply a reenactment, but a controlled environment in which routine becomes a form of endurance.
The piece extends a line of work Ai has pursued for more than a decade. In 2013, he unveiled S.A.C.R.E.D. at Zuecca Project Space in Venice during the Biennale, using six dioramas to reconstruct his detention. That same year, he released Dumbass, a heavy-metal music video about the experience, which he described as “a kind of self-therapy.” He later said the work was “not really about me,” but about how state power seeks to manage and maintain control.
Factory International has also commissioned two additional works: Eight-Nation Alliance Flags, a collection of flags made from buttons, and a new version of History of Bombs, a mural built from toy bricks. They join other large-scale works in the exhibition, including Law of the Journey, Wang Family Ancestral Hall, La Commedia Umana, and Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads, several of which are being shown in the UK for the first time.
Button Up! is described as confronting 200 years of power, trade, war, culture, and empire that have shaped relations between Britain and China. Sewing a Button distills that history into something more intimate and unsettling: a single body, a single room, and the slow pressure of time.
