Ai Weiwei in Manchester for Summer 2026: Button Up! at Aviva Studios
This summer, Ai Weiwei transforms Aviva Studios in Manchester with Button Up!, a vast and politically charged exhibition that confronts empire, labour and global power at monumental scale.
You can now see Ai Weiwei in Manchester, and the scale of his presence here is unmistakable. This summer, Button Up! occupies the Warehouse at Aviva Studios, filling the cavernous space with work that is unapologetically large, materially dense and politically alert. It is not a spectacle designed to impress from a distance. It asks you to spend time with it.
Running from 2 July to 6 September 2026, the exhibition, presented by Factory International, feels inseparable from its setting. Manchester’s industrial past is not used as a backdrop or a talking point. It is treated as something active and unresolved, shaping how the work reads and why it matters now. Ai Weiwei’s long-standing concerns with power, labour and global systems of exchange take on a particular clarity here.
One of the first works you encounter is Eight-Nation Alliance Flags. From afar, the installation reads as a series of monumental national flags. Up close, their surfaces resolve into nearly half a million buttons. The work refers to the early twentieth-century invasion of China by the Eight-Nation Alliance, which included Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Russia and the United States. The buttons were sourced from a factory in Croydon that closed in 2019, then shipped to China and assembled by local craftspeople. The choice of material matters. Buttons are domestic, ordinary, easy to overlook. Here, they carry the weight of imperial history, stitched together through labour that spans continents.
Across the space stretches History of Bombs, Ai Weiwei’s largest toy-brick work to date. At twenty-five metres wide and ten metres high, it depicts life-size weapons, from conventional arms to weapons of mass destruction, built from more than a million brightly coloured bricks. The contrast is uncomfortable. The material suggests play, familiarity and childhood. The subject matter does not. Produced with the help of volunteers in Manchester alongside craftspeople in China, the work draws a quiet but pointed line between local participation and global systems of violence and manufacture.
Beyond these monumental works, the exhibition brings together timber, porcelain, cotton, glass and bronze. These are materials closely tied to both craft traditions and industrial production, and Ai Weiwei handles them without nostalgia. The title Button Up! carries a note of dry humour, but it also speaks to restraint, obedience and censorship. Nothing here is over-explained. The work trusts the viewer to recognise the tensions it sets in motion.
This exhibition could not have happened just anywhere. In Manchester, a city built on trade, manufacture and the long reach of empire, the work lands differently. The histories Ai Weiwei is dealing with are not distant or theoretical here. They are woven into the fabric of the city itself. Rather than smoothing that over, he leans into it, using scale and repetition to make those connections difficult to ignore.
The result is not a neat summary of the past, nor a moral lesson delivered at arm’s length. It is a show that insists on proximity, asking how much of what built the modern world still operates, quietly and persistently, in the present.
Ai Weiwei will speak about the exhibition on 2 July, offering further insight into the ideas behind the work and his ongoing engagement with questions of power, truth and justice.
Ai Weiwei: Button Up!
2 July to 6 September 2026 (closed Mondays)
The Warehouse, Aviva Studios, Water Street, Manchester
Tickets from £15
More information at factoryinternational.org
Elena Leo is the Culture & Lifestyle Editor of Ikon London Magazine.
