Having spent much of the year calling attention to Europe’s ongoing refugee crisis, Chinese artist-activist Ai Weiwei is set to make his next move in Florence, Italy, later this week. As part of the Palazzo Strozzi’s upcoming Ai Weiwei retrospective, the artist has wrapped the museum’s exterior with a ribbon of bright orange lifeboats. Titled Reframe, the work is one of 22 by the artist to be displayed at the Palazzo and is perhaps the show’s most powerful. Hung directly over the building’s second-floor windows, the boats’ inflated edges mimic the shape of the voussoirs they cover while their latticed-canvas floors impose a grid that produces a prison-bar effect when viewed from the interior. The boats, a stark contrast with the Palazzo’s rusticated stone façade, serve as a glaring reminder about the dangers refugees face in traversing the Mediterranean to get to countries like Italy. In this way, Reframe is very much in the same spirit as the artist’s haunting life-vest installation in Berlin earlier this year, in which the artist hung 40,000 used refugee life vests on the columns of the city’s landmark Konzerthaus.
The Florence exhibition, titled “Libero” (translation: free), encompasses other multimedia works by Ai Weiwei that challenge the confines of a typical museum show, using every imaginable corner of the structure and its courtyard.
The exhibition runs from September 23 through January 22, 2017. For more information visit palazzostrozzi.org.
