1989: A year like any other? - Ai Wei wei in Munich

At the Haus der Kunst, a stark museum built by the Nazis in Munich, is a remarkable exhibition by the Chinese artist Ai Wei wei.  He was the original inspiration behind the Bird’s Nest Beijing Olympic Stadium, though he abandoned the commission.  He is one of the most influential artists in the world because he brings his unique, personal, shocking and sometimes heart-rending vision to the contemporary destruction, as he sees it, of Chinese traditions and culture.   His most famous art work is three photos of himself dropping – and smashing – a Han dynasty urn.  In the Munich exhibition that sense of wanton destruction, of its traumatic effect, is shown in a collection of Neolithic pots which have been simply and brightly painted in colours you could see in Ikea – the modern simply effacing and destroying the ancient without, as it were, a backward look.

His vision of destruction, sadness, loss and memory took on a particularly poignant turn when he got involved in the aftermath of the Sichuan earthquake.  He visited the site of schools which had collapsed killing all the pupils. All that remained of the children were their plastic backpacks. So, for the Munich show, he made a gigantic plastic cover for the whole gallery with a quote from one of the parents about the death of their child. The whole piece is made of schoolchildren’s plastic backpacks stitched together.  In the same way some of the wooden sculptures in the exhibition are made of wood salvaged from ancient temples that have been demolished. Or they are traditional wooden Chinese furniture cut in half, or with a great log through it.  All these works give a powerful feeling of how history in China has suddenly accelerated, memory can hardly keep up and everywhere there is a feeling of the traditional being ruptured and disappearing.  Those feelings of sadness and loss can exist alongside a sense of delight and wonder at what China is achieving.  The reflective self-consciousness about what we are losing and what we are gaining all the time is most of what makes us human.

And how important these themes of loss and change are so significant at the time of the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall.  I went to a debate about human rights between Bianca Jagger, who is now a fabulously glamorous and intensely serious campaigner against human rights violations, Helena Waldmann, a a ground-breaking German choreographer who had worked with Iranian and Palestinian women and Yang Lian, a Chinese poet who now lives in London.  Involving a Chinese poet with personal memories of the events in Tiananmen Square in 1989 was a stroke of genius because it reminded us that, although 1989 felt like a year of opening and freedom in Europe (even with the many subsequent doubts and regrets), for some, as Yang Lian wrote in one of his poems, 1989 was ‘a year like any other’.

Religion and politics in Ahmadabad

Ahmadabad has a beautiful Jain temple built in 1850. You enter through an arch covered with sculptures of rounded animals and gods from Hindu mythology into a courtyard with four ornate cloisters around the sides. In the courtyard too the walls are covered with elegant, sinuous carved figures of Radha and Krishna playing his flute and other Hindu gods. Away from the noisy street full of horn-blaring cars, scooters and lorries, the courtyard is quiet and still. The only other person around is a temple widow dressed in a white sari, bowing and praying at each chapel in turn. Around each of the four walls are chapels behind wooden doors containing trios of white marble gods with jewelled all-seeing eyes. You walk around a cloister looking in turn into each chapel, each subtly different, but all the statues are white. In the middle of the cloister a bell hangs from the roof. You ring the bell and then pass on to the next chapel - and in it are gods which are not white like all the others. The first one is black. Ringing the bell and the sudden sight of something unexpected are connected in your mind, as if when you rang the bell the god came alive and became different from all the others, as if by magic. The meditative act of ringing the bell and then contemplating the effect has brought you into a sharper contact with the deity you are now looking at, different to all those you have looked at before, The vast distance between your material self and the divine is momentarily, magically shortened; your belief in magic as an explanation for the inexplicable is momentarily restored. You walk round the three cloisters and ring three bells. Each unexpected god following the bell is more ornate than the last. And the third is gold and crowned. To ring the fourth and largest bell you enter the temple in the middle of the quadrangle. This is the sanctum sanctorum, the holy of holies and here is the group of three most divine statues, white again, two smaller ones on each side and in the centre a large statue with wide-opened jewelled eyes.



Ahmadabad is Mahatma Gandhi’s home town and his ashram is here by the river, the place from where he launched many of his protests and campaigns. It is now a simple museum, untainted by theme park commercialism. The most moving room in the small collection of rooms in which he and his wife Kasturba lived is the small white room in which he lived where his low table and his spinning wheel remain. On the outside are the original instructions for life in the ashram, embracing poverty, chastity, respect for all religions, the unacceptable and irreligious nature of caste divisions and so on. The ashram has no religious iconography, in fact the only icons are the Chinese symbol of the three wise monkeys, see no evil, speak no evil and hear no evil; symbols to which Gandhi was much attached. But nevertheless there are many references to the importance of spirituality. The connection between religion and political liberation is made explicit. The importance of connecting individual moral and spiritual acts to collective and political acts is constantly re-emphasised. As in the Jain temple, the link between the mortal, temporal life of individuals and the divine is constantly re-emphasised. The notion of individual influence or agency is morally and mystically connected to the unknowable divine.



These two experiences draws attention to the central place of spirituality in motivating belief as well as action in all aspects of Indian life. Almudena from Mexico, another very religious country, worked on the victorious presidential campaign of Vicente Fox and, at the Gandhi ashram, she recalls how old people, particularly in rural areas, who came to Fox’s rallies would want to touch him and then begin to cry, as if he was somehow sanctified and contact with him would bring blessings to their life. Frederico from Brazil recounts a story of a participatory budgeting exercise conducted in Brazil when local people were consulted about their priorities for public expenditure. They did not want to see public money spent on a school or a clinic to the surprise of the local government officials. Instead they wanted the money spent on building a church, which was not at all the outcome intended.