Ai Weiwei’s ongoing engagement with the global refugee crisis has reached a monumental milestone with the opening of ‘Laundromat’ at New York’s Deitch Projects. The exhibition brings together thousands of materials collected from an informal refugee camp in Idomeni — a small village in northern Greece and official border crossing into the Republic of Macedonia. At its peak in spring 2016, up to 15,000 men, women and children — mostly from Syria, Afghanistan or Iraq — spent weeks in dire conditions with scarce food and harrowing sanitary conditions. In may 2016, Idomeni was shut down, displacing the thousands of refugees living there. In a rush to mobilize, many left behind clothes, shoes, personal mementos and photographs. Ai Weiwei has collected, washed, organized and now exhibited these objects in New York as a poignant and powerful testament to a human condition at a tumultuous moment in time. Through his work, he has become one of the most important advocates of human rights.
Ai weiwei’s ‘Laundromat’ takes over Deitch Projects. The space has been turned into a monumental display of carefully-hung clothes, meticulously-arranged shoes and precisely-folded blankets, each which have been washed, hung to dry, steamed, sorted and organized. On the ground, 2,000 posts from ‘the newsfeed’ canvas the gallery floor, displaying both text and image-based snippets from the media. This ongoing project, first started in January 2016 by Ai Weiwei and his assistants, captures high-impact media reports relevant to the crisis as cataloged on a private Whatsapp group. Exhibited on the ground, these fragments of tweets, video stills and digital articles portray an overarching snapshot of the media’s reaction to the historic humanitarian crisis. On the gallery walls, images of Weiwei and his team in Idomeni span from floor to ceiling, documenting months of life inside these informal camps and poignantly embodying the experience of the refugees.
