Galerie Urs Meile Luzern presents: "Rebars - Lucerne", a solo exhibition by Ai Weiwei. The exhibition "Rebars – Lucerne" features a series of works closely related to the earthquake that devastated the province of Sichuan in May 2008. The earthquake cost ten thousands of casualties, among them thousands of children buried under school buildings that collapsed like a house of cards. Their death was soon explicitly linked to substandard construction and administrative corruption. Via the Internet, Ai Weiwei organised voluntary helpers in a kind of citizens’ initiative to identify the children who had died – a project calling for considerable courage, since the authorities opposed the action, intimidating, harassing and, in some cases, even arresting the volunteers. The names of the identified children were initially published on Ai’s blog and subsequently on Twitter, after the blog was closed down. By 2 September 2009, 4851 names had been accumulated. These Ai shows in a video loop accompanied by immeasurably sad music. In the exhibition, the video 4851 is integrated into an installation, where it is screened on a laptop placed on a Chinese school desk.

The Rebars – three sets will be on view in the exhibition -- each consist of three seemingly identical, disturbingly twisted pieces of reinforcement bars. One of them is the original, retrieved from the rubble of what was once Beichuan High School; the other two are duplicates. We are confronted with a subtle game of chance, in which formal elegance is subverted by memories of the horrors of the earthquake. The shoddy engineering of the original is underscored by the dispassionate irony of two hand-wrought clones and complemented by a video showing the provenance and production of the pieces.