Ai Weiwei's Briefcase - St. Peters Square

3D Model

This Soviet-era briefcase with an umbrella was featured at Ai Weiwei’s, In Search of Humanity exhibition in Vienna, Austria. The hammer and sickle is a prominent communist symbol denoting the union between workers (proletariat) and peasants (traditionally agricultural workers). For Ai Weiwei, the top-down planning and autocratic norms of communist regimes are as senselessly impractical as a briefcase with an umbrella through it. This may also be a reference to the very limited dissemination of information that is typical of these regimes. In China, for example, the government controls what information is publicly available and what is not. The Tiananmen Square massacre, resulting in the deaths of some 10,000 political dissidents, is scrubbed from Baidu, China’s search equivalent of Google. This may also reference a Cheget, a briefcase that shadows the Soviet Premiere (or current-day Russian President, Vladamir Putin) and enables him to launch a nuclear strike remotely. Umbrellas aren’t useful fallout shields.