Ai Weiwei: Yours Truly

This event is sold out but we expect there to be seats available since this is a free event. We welcome you to wait outside the theatre in our waitlist line and we will start admitting those in line when the event starts as seats are available.

Following Ai Weiwei’s detention by Chinese authorities, the outspoken artist and activist, though still prevented from traveling abroad, transformed America’s most notorious former penitentiary into a powerful artistic platform without ever having set foot on Alcatraz Island in 2014.

The @Large exhibition featured portraits made from LEGO bricks of prisoners of conscience from around the world. For the final artwork of the @Large exhibition, inspired by his father, Ai Weiwei invited visitors to write messages of hope to the imprisoned activists featured in the LEGO portraits using postcards imprinted with the national birds and flowers of the countries where the prisoners were being held. The project was named Yours Truly and by the end of the exhibition, over 90,000 postcards had been sent across the globe. Then something even more astonishing happened: prisoners and their families began writing back.

Ai Weiwei: Yours Truly follows these postcards around the globe from Alcatraz Island to Bahrain, Washington, D.C. to Cairo and beyond, as former prisoners of conscience and the families of those still detained describe their impossible choices and the comfort they found in messages from people they would never meet.

The screening will be followed by a conversation between the audience and Cheryl Haines, Director of Ai Weiwei: Yours Truly, Curator of the exhibition @Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz, and Executive Director of FOR-SITE.

Learn more about film on the Ai Weiwei: Yours Truly website.

Presented by FOR-SITE and the Presidio Theatre.