Ai Weiwei has made an appearance outside the Old Bailey in support of Julian Assange, whose extradition hearing continues inside the courtroom.
The artist arrived yesterday, 28 September, wearing a t-shirt on which a photo of him with Assange was printed. He said of Assange to the Associated Press: ‘He is prepared to fight, but this is not fair to him. Free him, let him be a free man.’
Ai, now settled in Cambridge, has previously come out in support of the Wikileaks founder, visiting him during the seven years Assange remained in the Ecuadorian Embassy to the United Kingdom.
The demonstration comes as the artist has been making the publicity rounds in support of a new commission for the moving billboards in London’s Piccadilly Circus. For the duration of October, work by Ai will be shown for two minutes a day (from 8.20pm to 8.22pm) on the huge screens which normally service high-value advertising. This follows the release in August of Coronation, a new feature-length documentary on the COVID-19 pandemic.
In a sit-down interview with the BBC on Tuesday the artist bemoaned the global strength of his home country, China, describing it domestically as a ‘police state’.
‘The West should really have worried about China decades ago. Now it’s already a bit too late, because the West has built its strong system in China and to simply cut it off, it will hurt deeply. That’s why China is very arrogant.’
The Assange hearing is due to end this week. The activist is accused of conspiring with army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to expose military secrets in 2010.
The court heard that, if the US has its way, and he was found guilty of the host of espionage charges levelled against him, Assange could potentially be held in isolation at the ADX Colorado ‘Supermax’ prison, where inmates spend up to 23 hours a day in their cells, currently home to the likes of Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman, the Mexican drug lord and Terry Nichols, conspirator in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
