“We’re going to make stuff out of beads that’s going to take individuals’s breath away,” says Ralph Ziman within the trailer for “The MiG-21 Challenge,” a navy jet that he and a transcontinental crew coated nostril to tail in tens of millions upon tens of millions of glass beads.
For the previous 12 years, the Los Angeles-based artist has examined the impacts of the Chilly Battle Period and the worldwide arms commerce by a trilogy titled Weapons of Mass Manufacturing, motivated by his upbringing in Apartheid-era South Africa. Greater than half a decade within the making, “The MiG-21 Challenge” completes the collection.
The primary installment, “The AK-47 Challenge,” reimagined the aesthetic of one of many world’s most ubiquitous wartime weapons, the Avtomat Kalashnikova 1947, by coating dozens of the weapons in colourful glass beads. The second mission revolved across the Casspir, a heavy-duty Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected Car (MRAPV) launched within the Nineteen Seventies, which he likewise ornamented in vibrant geometric patterns.
“The thought was to take these weapons of conflict and to repurpose them,” Ziman says, flipping the narrative about icons of violence and remodeling them as an alternative into symbols of resilience, collaboration, and collectivity. Autos and firearms morph right into a theater of hope and power within the face of a horrible Twentieth-century legacy.
Apartheid, which in Afrikaans means “separateness,” is the identify assigned by the minority white-ruled Nationalist Celebration of South Africa to a harsh system of racial segregation that started in 1948. The interval lasted till 1991 and was intently linked inside the context of worldwide relations to the Chilly Battle as tensions erupted between the U.S. and the previous U.S.S.R. Spurred by the deterioration of the 2 international locations’ WWII alliance and fears in regards to the unfold of Communism into the West, the conflict started in 1947 and in addition led to 1991 when the usS.R. was dissolved.
Throughout this time, the Russians produced a fighter jet known as the Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-21. The aircraft is “the most-produced supersonic fighter plane of all time,” Ziman says. “The Russians constructed 12,500 MiG-21s, they usually’re nonetheless in use right now—identical to the Casspir and identical to the AK-47s. Nevertheless it’s one factor to say, hey, I need to bead a MiG, after which the subsequent factor, you’ve bought a 48-foot MiG sitting in your studio.”
“The MiG-21 Challenge” combines pictures and costume design with historic analysis and time-honored Indigenous craft. The mission encompasses not solely the jet however a collection of cinematic images and elaborate Afrofuturist regalia impressed by navy flight fits, African tribal textiles, and house journey.
Ziman’s crew contains quite a few expert artisans from Zimbabwe and Indigenous Ndebele ladies from South Africa’s Mpumalanga Province, who’re famend for his or her beadwork. For the Ndebele, beadwork is a way of expressing cultural identification and rites of passage, taking over highly effective political connotations within the Twentieth century because it turned related to pre-colonial African traditions and identification.
Tapping into the teachings of our not-so-distant previous, Ziman addresses present conflicts like conflict and the worldwide arms race, fashionable colonialism, systemic racism, and white supremacy by the lens of Apartheid. Funds raised all through the method, a part of the mission of the Weapons of Mass Manufacturing trilogy as an entire, are being donated to the individuals of Ukraine in help of the nation’s ongoing battle with Russia.
You’ll be capable to see the “The MiG-21 Challenge” later this 12 months in Seattle, the place it will likely be on view from June 21 to January 26, 2026, on the Museum of Flight. Discover extra on Ziman’s web site.
