The chinese are afraid of oppositional politicians throwing protest flyers out of a taxi window during the national party congress. The government induces to remove every Taxi's window crank.
Our celebrated superstar artist Ai Weiwei builds a crystal Taxi Window Crank and exhibits it. Brilliant, a window crank becomes the symbol for an anachronistic and repressive government.
I don't really get the point of this work besides its nice formal aesthetics and carefully crafted implementation. It neither tells me anything about the background story that underlies the work nor does it provide me with anything that goes beyond the information that I just could have read.
In the late 1980s Italian tankers carrying barrels of toxic waste arrived at the seaport of Koko (Nigeria). A farmer, not aware of its content and the risks it can cause, agreed to store it for $100 a month. Some of the barrels blew up others were emptied by the rural population just to store food in them. They suffered from chemical burns and the contaminated food.
Alfredo Jaar installed light boxes with photos of the citizens of Koko suspending over water-filled barrels in which the photos are mirrored. So what you see is basically a photo of some smiling african looking guys reflected on the top of some water-filled barrels.
Again: I don't really get the point of this work besides its nice formal aesthetics and carefully crafted implementation. It neither tells me anything about the background story that underlies the work nor does it provide me with anything that goes beyond the information that I just could have read.
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2087