Visuality and Parrēsia: Ai Weiwei’s countervisual re-enactment of Alan Kurdi’s image

Abstract

As an intervention in the study of visuality and countervisuality (Mirzoeff 2011), underscoring its connection to democracy and parrēsia (Foucault 2010), this article examines Ai Weiwei’s re-enactment of Alan Kurdi’s image in 2016. The instant and expandable polemics that characterized the reception of the re-enactment built on the unethicalness – even blatant inappropriateness – of a celebrity’s appropriation of (the graphic representation of) a dead child’s body. Building on the role of the Chinese celebrity artist-activist as a public intellectual, this article advances a way to rethink the re-enactment beyond the idea of shock and away from controversy, analyzing it as an indictment of two interrelated ‘crises’: the European refugee ‘crisis’ and the inadequate response to the influx of refugees in 2015, and the ‘crisis’ of democracy more broadly, considering that respect for human rights is integral to democratic governance. To make a case for the re-enactment as a form of countervisuality, I deploy Barthes’s theorization on the punctum and studium of photographs. The contention is that Ai’s re-enactment of Nilüfer Demir’s photo – and the controversy surrounding it – actualizes the punctum and studium of the precursor image to function as a denunciation of the ‘crises’ of our present moment.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The artist-activist’s acts of parrēsia are the subject of the 2012 documentary film Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, written and directed by Alison Klayman.

2 Henry Jenkins, Gabriel Peters-Lazaro, and Sangita Shresthova define ‘civic imagination’ ‘as the capacity to imagine alternatives to current cultural, social, political, or economic conditions; one cannot change the world without imagining what a better world might look like. Beyond that, the civic imagination requires and is realized through the ability to imagine the process of change, to see oneself as a civic agent capable of making change, to feel solidarity with others whose perspectives and experiences are different than one’s own, to join a larger collective with shared interests, and to bring imaginative dimensions to real-world spaces and places’ (2020, 5).

3 I am adopting Thomas Olesen’s definition of re-enactments based on the Kurdi images ‘as photographs of events where activists re-perform the scenes depicted in the original photograph’ (2018, 666).

4 When referring to the European refugee ‘crisis’ throughout this article, the term ‘crisis’ is enclosed within quotation marks to signal how it has been deployed to further particular political interests (Sohlberg et al. 2019, 2276). For an examination of the strategic use of the discourse of ‘crisis’ in specific cultural moments, see Mendes 2021.

5 This image is available at: https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/special-report/story/20160215-ai-weiwei-tribute-to-syrian-refugee-aylan-kurdi-828413-2016-02-03

6 Such ‘impromptu publics of moral spectatorship’ are a possible iteration of the idea of ‘affective publics’ (Papacharissi 2015). See Lin Prøitz’s discussion of how the reception of the Kurdi image among the youth population in Oslo and Sheffield ‘elicited an initial affective response that raised awareness of the refugee “crisis” among the younger generation, which in turn generated engagement and mobilization’ (2017, 358); on the role of affect, Cigdem Bozdag and Kevin Smets’s study of reactions to Kurdi’s images through a qualitative study of tweets from Turkey and Flanders (Belgium) finds that ‘Emotions and affect play a key role in the collected tweets (…). The range of emotions varies from sadness and benevolence to shame, anger, and pleasure along with a varying tonality of tweets from a sympathetic to an angry and hateful one’ (2017, 4055). See also Avishek Ray’s argument on the ontological changes to the category of ‘migration’, brought about by the image of Kurdi, towards a focus on refugees’ experiences (2021, 101). Interviewees in Ai’s book Human Flow: Stories from the Global Refugee Crisis likewise stress how this image ‘galvanized support and changed the course of the discussion on the refugee situation’ (2020, 20; interview with Boris Cheshirkov, UNHCR, Lesbos, Greece, 2016-01-01 and 2016-02-19).

7 On the artist-activist’s perceived appropriation of migrants’ experiences, see, for example, Zimanyi (2022), on how Ai’s exhibit Laundromat (2016) was received as ‘a willful appropriation of refugees’ belongings for personal artistic gain’ (2022, 152) and, with reference to the re-enactment of Kurdi’s image, how Ai was critiqued by other artists ‘for supposedly capitalizing on Kurdi’s death for personal gain’ (2022, 154).

8 See Deutsche Welle (DW)’s list of quotes from other news outlets exemplifying these reactions at https://www.dw.com/en/essential-or-impudent-the-debate-about-art-and-refugees/a-39177781 (6 September 2017).

9 Ai defines himself as an exile from his native country of China and a refugee as he ‘cannot live where [he] grew up’ (Mendes and Ai 2022, 170).

10 Such accusations of unethical aestheticization, Sontag reports, have been famously levelled against, for example, Sebastião Salgado’s work on the reality of global migration and Gilles Peress, Susan Meiselas, and Joel Meyerowitz’s work on the World Trade Center ruins.

11 While the documentary value of photography has been well established, the idea of photography as a recorder of truth, affording some sort of ‘transparency’ through which the viewer can access ‘reality’, has also been sufficiently challenged as photographs cannot ever be ‘true’. On the disciplinary apparatus that made photography work as an instrument of surveillance, official record, documentary evidence, and, ultimately, truth, see John Tagg’s Disciplinary Frame (2009).

12 The title of Basaran’s article, “The saved and the drowned: Governing indifference in the name of security”, draws upon Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved (1988).

13 For example, negative news coverage in Europe about the asylum-seeking ‘crisis’ is not directed at disliking the individual refugee, but rather focuses on the threat refugees pose to ‘society’. In significant ways, this is an iteration of the social production of a ‘moral panic’, trying to instill fear in the community, leading to the rise of authoritarian populism in the 1980s UK under Margaret Thatcher, as demonstrated in the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies’ landmark volume Policing the Crisis (Hall et al. 1978).

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Ana Cristina Mendes

Ana Cristina Mendes is an Associate Professor of English Studies at the School of Arts and Humanities, University of Lisbon, Portugal, and Chair of the ACS–Association for Cultural Studies (2022–26). She uses cultural and postcolonial theory to examine literary and screen texts (in particular, intermedia adaptations) as venues for resistant knowledge formations in order to expand upon theories of epistemic injustice. Her latest book, Decolonising English Studies from the Semi-periphery (Palgrave Macmillan 2023), explores, from the perspective of the semi-periphery of the academic world-system, how decolonising the curriculum might work in English studies, one of the fields in university that bears the most robust traces of its imperial and colonial roots.