Meet the Artist: Alison Klayman & Film Screening: “Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry”

Dialogues: Alison Klayman
Thursday, November 8, 2012

Alison Klayman, director of Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, took questions from Twitter users. This is part of the Hirshhorn’s Dialogues program, an ongoing series of Twitter-based Q&A sessions with artists, curators, critics, collectors, and scholars. Click here for the full twitter discussion. 

Film Screening of Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry
Thursday, November 8, 2012

Given unprecedented access to the artist during the most eventful year of his life, first-time director Alison Klayman produced an indispensable document of the life and work of Ai Weiwei. Her debut feature, Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, won a Special Jury Prize at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. She’ll share the details, introduce the film, and answer questions. For more information about the film, visit www.aiweiweineversorry.com. Seating is limited and available on a first-come-first-seated basis.

Fresh from college, Klayman ventured to China, where she bounced between jobs and, as an incidental side-gig, shot a brief video to accompany an exhibition of photographs by Ai. The project grew into a feature-length portrait that delves into the artist’s influences (Joseph Beuys and Marcel Duchamp, among others), his devotion to his mother and father (Ai Qing, a poet suppressed first by anti-Communists and then under Mao), his process (perpetual performance, public engagement through social media, the conceptual transformation of traditional aesthetics) and the hazards of surviving as a dissident artist. She’ll share the details, introduce the film and answer questions.