Artists slingshot sunflower seeds into Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds

Sunflower Seeds on Sunflower Seeds from IOCOSE

Artists slingshot sunflower seeds into Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds

On January 29th, armed with slingshots and translucent surgical gloves, the four members of artist group IOCOSE shot real sunflower seeds into Ai Weiwei’s installation of 100 million hand-made porcelain sunflower seeds housed in the Tate Modern. A gesture that embraced Ai’s own philosophy of “what you see is not what you see, and what you see is not what it means,” IOCOSE also replaced the exhibition sign with a rendition of their own, which read “IOCOSE’s Sunflower Seeds on Sunflower Seeds.” The intervention has been greeted by some as “cheap publicity hack on a [much better known] artist” and as a “hit,” the product of “mischievous” artists.

Ultimately, Ai Weiwei chimed in via Twitter with “good work.”

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iocose.org

The group IOCOSE has been working in Italy and Europe since 2006. It organizes actions in order to subvert ideologies, practices and processes of identification and production of meanings. It uses pranks and hoaxes as tactical means, as joyful and sound tools. IOCOSE thinks about the streets, internet and word of mouth as a battlefield. Tactics such as mimesis and trickery are used to lead and delude the audience into a semantic pitfall.