Renowned Chinese contemporary artist and activist Ai Weiwei is all set to hold his maiden exhibition in the Gulf region at the Garage Gallery in the Fire Station, reported The Peninsula.

Qatar Museums (QM) will present Ai Weiwei’s recent works from March 15 to June 1 and will feature one of his most prominent and poignant projects highlighting the plight of refugees — Laundromat (2016).

Reflecting Ai Weiwei’s continuing engagement with the global refugee crisis, this monumental work brings together thousands of articles of clothing collected from a makeshift refugee camp in Idomeni – a small village in northern Greece and official border crossing to the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

The camp was shut down in May 2016 and the refugees that had been living there were evacuated, leaving their possessions behind. 

Laundromat displays carefully hung clothes and meticulously arranged shoes, each of which have been washed, hung to dry, steamed, sorted and organised.

In all, 2,046 items of clothing are displayed alongside personal mementos and photographs.

Laundromat also features the film “Idomeni” (2016) which captures the everyday conditions of the refugees up to the moment when the camp was evacuated.

His show in Doha highlights Qatar’s development as a creative and artistic hub that encourages dialogue through artistic expression. 

The exhibition follows Ai Weiwei’s first visit to Qatar in April 2017, when he discussed his life and work at a packed public event at the Museum of Islamic Art and met with young artists at the Fire Station, according to Qatar Tribune.

Alongside Laundromat, other projects by the artist will be exhibited in the Fire Station, including Stacked Porcelain Vases as a Pillar (2016), which represents six themes of the refugee condition — War, Ruins, Journey, Crossing the Sea, Refugee Camps, and Demonstrations, and Tyre (2016), a traditional symbol of safety turned on its head by being crafted from marble and representing the struggle faced by refugees crossing the Mediterranean Sea.