The Tate Modern hosted an interesting artwork this weekend, titled “Slowalk (In support of Ai Weiwei)”. It was organised by the artist Hamish Fulton, who describes himself as a “walking artist”. It seemed like performance art to me, but apparently it was actually a “meditative experience”, and those taking part in it are “both art and viewer on a communal journey”.
Around 100 volunteers were placed around the ramp leading into the Turbine gallery of the Tate Modern (the other end of which is filled with Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds exhibit, on display until the end of this weekend). The volunteers then walked very slowly across to the other end of the ramp, pacing the walk so that it would take exactly 30 minutes, before turning around and walking back, again timed so that it would take 30 minutes. This was then repeated once more, for a total of two hours of extremely slow walking. The four lines of volunteers crossed paths during the process of the walk, and visitors to the museum weaved their way through the walkers on their way in and out of the museum – which I think would make for quite a cool video in fast forward.
I personally thought it was a fitting way to show support for Ai Weiwei — an artist who himself seems to like using performance art as a form of expression. There seemed to be a wide range of motivations among those who took part — some just thought it would be an interesting experience, and others saw it more explicitly as a protest, and printed out names of Chinese and Tibetan dissidents which they distributed to people to tape to their clothes. I felt a little bit uncomfortable that an event that I had seen as a more subtle expression of support was hijacked as a catch-all protest against the Chinese authorities — but at the same time, it felt like a part of the idea was for it to be a very organic and natural collective movement, to which the participants could assign and from which they could take whatever messages they felt were most appropriate — and it would have been strange if an event in support of freedom of expression had placed too many controls on how the participants could behave. Like the Sunflowers Seeds exhibit, there could be lots of possible interpretations, and for me, the extremely slow (and, after two hours of shuffling, painful) steps forward seemed appropriately symbolic.
There were relatively loose constraints on how the event was set up, and although everyone needed to cover the same distance in the same amount of time, what started as a uniform line of walkers very quickly broke up into a very staggered line of people moving at different paces, before re-converging at the end. Everyone had their own walking style — some covered the distance with a slow but steady shuffle, while others opted for very very slow but longer steps. There was information posted at each end of the space, and Tate staff handed out information to visitors to the museum — some of whom joined in (but because they didn’t have the instructions that had been given to the volunteers, they didn’t know that they were supposed to walk in formation, and so instead just very slowly walked across the room, out of sync with the rest of the group). One person sat down in the middle of the space for a while, and lots of people took lots of pictures.
Here’s the Tate’s video clip about the event:
After the event, the Tate held a screening of Ai Weiwei’s documentary about his journey through the Chinese judicial system, which is also on Youtube. They’ve also posted a video with excerpts from a Q&A session that he held at the Tate, where one of the questions he was asked was why he hasn’t been put in jail, and he replies that he doesn’t know, but that you have to take chances.
Ai Weiwei apparently also held a TED talk a few weeks before his arrest, which now feels oddly prescient: