Viewing Ai Weiwei: Button Up!

Objects that object.

Ai Weiwei has never believed that objects are neutral. This summer, Button Up! transforms Aviva Studios’ vast Warehouse into a landscape of porcelain, cotton, glass, bronze, buttons and toy bricks, where every material carries the weight of politics, labour and history. Opening in July, it is the artist’s largest presentation in the North to date.

Manchester is no incidental backdrop. As the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, the city provides a fitting context for Ai’s exploration of two centuries of entangled histories between Britain and China, from imperial trade and manufacturing to migration, surveillance and state power. Rather than illustrating history, he lets materials tell it.

Two major new commissions anchor the exhibition. Eight-Nation Alliance Flags transforms millions of buttons into monumental imperial banners, elevating an everyday fastening into a symbol of conquest and control. Nearby, a new version of History of Bombs, constructed entirely from toy bricks, turns the familiar language of childhood into an unsettling catalogue of modern warfare.

They sit alongside some of Ai’s most significant works. Law of the Journey, his 47-metre inflatable boat crowded with hundreds of refugee figures, is shown in the UK for the first time, while Wang Family Ancestral Hall painstakingly reconstructs a Ming dynasty temple from 1,500 timber components. Overhead, La Commedia Umana, a three-tonne Murano glass chandelier, hangs somewhere between spectacle and memorial.

The opening weekend introduces perhaps the exhibition’s most affecting work. Over 24 hours, Sewing a Button sees Ai re-enact his secret detention by Chinese authorities in 2011. Audiences enter in timed slots as the artist sleeps, eats, exercises, writes and undergoes interrogation inside a reconstruction of his prison cell. Less performance than act of witness, it quietly collapses the distance between biography, politics and art.

For Ai Weiwei, materials have always been political. Button Up! is a reminder that even the smallest object can carry the weight of history.