Silence:Shapes – B/B, 2012 (from Silence: Shapes series)

New shooting for his Flags series in Rotterdam Centrum

In Chuan Art book (#2) from Taiwan

Restlessly Filippo Minelli has been traveling throughout Europe. Several new works have been made, one of them is Santa Europa da Esperança, a public installation in Lisboa. Others have been exhibited at the Noordkaap Tour, a group show in Dordrecht, Netherlands, which showed a review of some of his recent works: the We don’t need you at all performance in Cologne, Germany, the Flags of Istanbul and others.

Minelli’s next exhibition takes place in London this Saturday (Nov 10), a 1 day only group show at Chris Beetles Fine Photographs Gallery. After that a solo show in Cologne, Germany at Ruttkowski68 opens on Dec 7. Pick up the next issues of Elephant (NL) and Inventario (IT) because they feature some of his new works.

Insight in the background and production process of one of the most spectacular exhibitions of 2010, Sunflower Seeds by Ai Weiwei at Tate Modern. Follow Ai Weiwei to the city of Jingdezhen in northern Jiangxi, China, famed for its production of Imperial porcelain, where all of the sunflower seeds have been individually hand-sculpted and hand-painted.

> official site
> visitor questions answered by Ai Weiwei

Additionally, you can see Sunflower Seeds at Mary Boone Gallery right now. The exhibition opened on January 7 and is on view until February 4. Below are a few installation shots. The installation is made out of millions (five tons) of hand-painted porcelain sunflower seeds. Each actual-size seed is unique and intricately hand-formed and like those shown at Tate Modern painted in Jingdezhen.

The sunflower, following the sun, is a well-known metaphor for The People during China’s Cultural Revolution. The seeds provided nourishment at all levels of society, and the ubiquitous discarded husks provided evidence of an individual’s existence. Ai Weiwei created a deceptively unified field with a large number of individual seeds. Sunflower Seeds comments on social, political and economical issues relevant to contemporary China such as the role of the individual in relationship to the collective.

(photos by twi-ny.com)

Here is the result: