Ai Weiwei: History of Bombs review – high-impact reminder of our insatiable desire for destruction
The bomb reproduced in a life-sized 3D image on the floor of the Imperial War Museum seems almost comical – so big and clumsy, like something out of an old film of a Jules Verne story. Surely this monster was never used. But the Soviet Union’s Tsar Bomba, the most powerful nuclear weapon ever created, was once detonated. Suspended beneath a bomber because it was too big to fit inside, it was dropped over the Barents Sea and exploded with a force of 57 megatonnes, more than 1,500 times the combined strength of the two atomic bombs America dropped on Japan.
Ai Weiwei’s History of Bombs is an artwork about incalculable destruction in the form of an encyclopaedic collection of bombs and missiles, depicted with clinical precision across the floor of the Imperial War Museum’s central hall and flowing up a staircase. At a time when the world is quaking from a natural pandemic, he reminds us of our mind-boggling capacity to obliterate ourselves. It’s a mesmerising piece of popular history that shows in detail how the human race has accumulated a murderous arsenal since the early 20th century, when the invention of flight unleashed explosive new possibilities in warfare. There was barely more than a decade’s leap between the Wright Brothers taking off at Kitty Hawk and aerial bombing. The earliest weapons here are small enough to be chucked from a biplane.
If the surreal textbook depictions of bombs and missiles Ai has laid over the floor and plastered up a staircase appear unreal, then you only have to look up to be reminded that people really have built and used such horrors....
W. G. Sebald On the Natural History of Destruction
Posts on global war & violence
