Exhibition of the week Ai Weiwei: History of Bombs
Imperial War Museum, London SE1 (020-7416 5000, iwm.org.uk). Until 24 May 2021
“Seventy-five years ago this month, the United States detonated two nuclear weapons over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” said Hettie Judah in the I newspaper. The anniversary is a grimly appropriate context for the opening of History of
Bombs, the Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei’s new installation at the Imperial War Museum. Ai has lined the museum’s vast atrium with sheets of vinyl patterned with life-sized images of bombs, taking in everything from the very first aerial bombs to wartime bunkerbusters to 21st century cruise missiles. Ai’s bombs, 50 in total, are repeated across the space’s floors, staircase and walls “in a numbing profusion”. It’s “a simple graphic intervention”, and “horrifyingly effective” – creating “a carpet of bombs, a wallpaper of warheads”.
This is the first time the atrium has been given over to the work of a single artist, said Peter Chapman in the FT. And there could be “few better settings” for this exhibition. The area around the museum was itself “heavily bombed” during the Blitz, and the other objects on display in the space – including a Spitfire, a Japanese Ohka “kamikaze” plane and, most relevant, a Nazi V2 rocket – bring a sense of solidity to Ai’s depictions of weaponry. The diagrams themselves are presented in chronological order, becoming ever more “horrifically potent” with each instalment, said Marina
Vaizey on Artlyst. The earliest is a small “grenade-like bomb” used by the Italians during the first ever aerial bombing raids, in Libya in 1911. The most recent are America’s Hellfire missile, thought to have been used to assassinate Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in January; and the B61-Mod 12 – the US’s latest nuclear bomb, costing some $28m per unit.
Perhaps most staggering is the scale depiction on the atrium’s floor of “the most powerful nuclear weapon ever created”, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. The Soviet Union’s so-called “Tsar Bomba” looks like something out of Jules Verne – a weapon so colossal it would have been impractical for combat use. When it was tested over the Barents Sea in 1961, the weapon exploded with a force “more than 1,500 times the combined strength of the two atomic bombs America dropped on Japan”. However, it is those bombs – codenamed “Fat Man” and “Little Boy” – that pack the biggest punch. They look cartoonish: the former is “ludicrously bulbous”, while the latter looks like “a torpedo crossed with a hot-water boiler”. Apparently, these “different design approaches” were adopted so that the US military could “get the maximum experimental knowledge” from the annihilation of the two cities. Ai’s “mesmerising” installation is a chilling meditation on “our mind-boggling capacity to obliterate ourselves”.