By Calvin Wilder, AB '19
The Pozen Center was thrilled to partner with UChicago Arts and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago to host a screening of Ai Weiwei’s award-winning documentary Human Flow on April 29, followed by a Q&A with the artist himself.
Human Flow is a sweeping look at the largest refugee crisis since World War II. Ai Weiwei and his team travelled to 23 countries over the course of a year to tell the stories of some of the over 60 million refugees that have fled violence, hunger, and the devastating effects of climate change in recent years.
In the Q&A that followed, Weiwei told the audience, “I grew up in a country where my father was exiled the year I was born, so maybe that’s why I care about people in these conditions... it’s a very natural act to try to understand them and share their experience.”
Weiwei, like his father, has always been a prominent critic of state-sponsored injustices - his rebukes of the Chinese government once left him under house arrest for four years. This time, however, his criticism was focused on a different target.
“The US has only taken 11 Syrian refugees under this administration... this is totally sad, this is totally shameful,” he told the audience, which garnered a round of applause.
Weiwei’s film told the story of refugees in dire straits, from navigating the perilous Mediterranean crossing to fighting deportation in Europe. But Weiwei still chose to end his Q&A on a hopeful note.
“Let’s not give up - let’s try to make a society that can help the less fortunate, and that can bring up those children [from the film] and give them hope.”