Jack Arts

Factory International: Ai Weiwei

The world-renowned artist and activist Ai Weiwei is working with Manchester’s Factory International to present a powerful new body of work that confronts freedom, authority, and the individual’s place within society. Launching this season, Ai Weiwei: Button Up ! brings together art, architecture, and activism, challenging audiences to reflect on systems of power, truth, and resistance in the modern world.

JACK ARTS partnered with Factory International to take this urgent conversation beyond the gallery walls, inviting the public to encounter Ai Weiwei’s ideas through a large-scale billboard campaign across Manchester. Carefully selected sites frame and amplify the artist’s visual language without softening its political force, presenting striking black-and-white imagery and quotations at a monumental scale.

Through this series of artworks embedded within the everyday fabric of the city, the campaign asks all who encounter it to pause and consider: how do the systems built in the past continue to shape today’s injustices?