International News Digest
AI WEIWEI HOSPITALIZED IN MUNICH
The Chinese artist, architect, and activist Ai Weiwei has been hospitalized in Munich for a cerebral hemorrhage. As the Süddeutsche Zeitung’s Henrik Bork reports, Ai accuses the Chinese government and claims that he suffered the injury due to police brutality in the Chinese province of Sichuan. “I was operated on yesterday evening at 10 PM,” said Ai, who has been documenting the entire process at Munich’s Klinikum Großhadern on his Twitter feed. The surgery occurred last Monday; Ai was in Munich in preparation for his upcoming show at Munich’s Haus der Kunst.
“[The police] hit me so hard that I could have had light permanent damage,” Ai told the newspaper on the phone from his hospital bed. “What does that say about our state, which is just getting ready to celebrate its sixtieth year of existence, when this is the answer to legal investigations?” Ai believes that the police brutality came about as a result of his research into the “tofu school” scandal: Thousands of children died in schools across the Sichuan province during the May 2008 earthquake because the schools had been so poorly constructed. Ai put pressure on the government to explain corruption in the construction of the schools. When Ai returned to Sichuan in August to follow the trial against another fellow activist, Tan Zuoren, he was “hit hard on the head” by police in a Chengdu hotel, according to his own account.
“Since they hit me, I have suffered headaches and could no longer concentrate,” said Ai, who finally went to a doctor after the pain increased during his German stay. The director of neurosurgery in the Klinikum Großhadern advised an emergency operation: two holes in his cranium in order to reduce the pressure. “The patient is doing well,” said a representative for the clinic, who added that Ai will be stay for “a few days” more at the clinic under observation. Ai, who has decided to convalesce in Munich, hopes to attend his opening at the Haus der Kunst on October 11. He was also slated to attend the Frankfurt Book Fair in mid-October.
POLKE PAINTING GOES MISSING
Something apparently escaped the otherwise sharp eye of the German painter Sigmar Polke. According to the Süddeutsche Zeitung, a thief took a painting, Untitled—Oil on Drape, 1969, directly out of the artist’s atelier. The missing painting was noticed only after a Düsseldorf art shipper was offered the work at a low price. When the same shipper made an inquiry with Polke, the painter noticed that the work was missing. The painting has never been exhibited. According to the police, the work could have been stolen only by someone with access to the atelier.
SWINE FLU AS SCULPTURE
There’s a new strain of the swine-flu virus—this one artistic. As Agence France-Presse reports, a glass sculpture of the H1N1 virus will go on display at London’s Wellcome Collection, which specializes in artistic visions of history and science. Swine Flu was created by the artist Luke Jerram, who has already made glass sculptures based on the models of assorted viruses and bacterias, including bird flu, AIDS, E. coli, and smallpox. “I made this sculpture to think about the imminent pandemia of the H1N1 flu,” Jerram told the AFP. “And about the general fascination for the topic as it’s been presented in the media.”
Like the airborne virus, Jerram’s sculpture will travel internationally. After the London exhibtion, Swine Flu is due to make an appearance at Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum in the show “Medicine and Art,” which will also feature works by Damien Hirst, Marc Quinn, and Leonardo da Vinci. “Jerram’s work gives us a strange physical and a visually mind-blowing representation of the virus,” said Clare Matterson, director of Wellcome Trust’s department of medicine, society, and history. “It gives us a point of departure for exploring the impact that such viruses have had on populations and to discover more about the global research to fight them.”
LECTURING THE POMPIDOU?
An independent lecturer has won the right to give lectures in the Centre Pompidou—along with $1,460. As Le Monde’s Margaux Duquesne reports, a judge made the ruling in favor of Odile Dechelotte while ordering the Pompidou to suspend its ban on independent lecturers and to pay Dechelotte one thousand euros. The case began last July when Dechelotte asked the national museum for authorization to give a lecture to a group of visitors in the temporary exhibition on Pierre Soulages. The answer: The Pompidou does not allow for such lectures in temporary exhibitions, although they are allowed in the permanent collection. According to Duquesne, this ban does not appear in the center’s rules, although the Pompidou has been known to restrict lectures in temporary shows to its own employees. When Dechelotte took her case to court, the Pompidou argued that the ban was designed to ensure the quality of the visits and the security of the visitors, whose numbers tend to be greater in temporary shows than in the permanent collection. Moreover, the museum argued that temporary shows take place in smaller spaces, despite the higher frequency. The judge was not convinced and decided that the museum’s policy reduced in an irreversible manner the lecturers’ free exercise of their professional activity.