Ralph Ziman, "Weapons of Mass Production"

by T.s. Flock

Museum of Flight, Seattle, Washington

Continuing to January 26, 2026

Ralph Ziman and The Team, “The AK-47 Project” from the “Weapons of Mass Production” series, installation view. All images courtesy of Ralph Ziman.

Ralph Ziman’s “Weapons of Mass Production” series began with AK-47s rendered as glinting totems of global violence in the glass beadwork of mostly South African and Zimbabwean artisans. Ziman followed this with the up-armored absurdity of a full-size, still beaded “Casspir Project” (a military vehicle). Now his “MiG-21 Project” — the most mass-produced fighter jet in the relatively short history of aerial warfare — makes its debut.

Ziman, a South African-born film director, is not wielding the needles and glue gun here. His is a producer’s eye — conceptual, logistical, curatorial. He orchestrates, others embellish. And while the production team bends over backwards to highlight the labor and skill of the bead workers, there's an unresolved dissonance in the distinction they draw between artist and artisan, one that smells faintly of colonial hierarchy, no matter how well-meaning.

Set aside, then, the circular debates about the “artist’s hand” and authenticity. Ziman’s series is already an unabashed spectacle that renders moot much of that debate. These are cultural readymades mutated by communal craft, throwing back in the face of post-colonial power the very objects of its violence, now made tactile and extravagantly useless.

Ralph Ziman and The Team, “The Casspir Project,” beaded Casspir military vehicle.

As with the best agitprop, the effect of Ziman’s objects is both garish and grave: a surreal funhouse reflection of empire, staged with maximal production values. Indeed, the exhibition is incredibly well-crafted, thoughtful for its didactics, supported with abundant and polished video media, and enriched with tactile objects for a more hands-on experience.

The exhibition includes a lot of documentation related to previous iterations of Ziman’s “Weapons of Mass Production” series, providing not just context for the “MiG-21 Project,” but also the historical background that threads all three projects together.

The “Ghosts” series served as the genesis of the “Weapons of Mass Production” project. It began as a battalion of beaded AK-47s, lovingly crafted in translucent glass and then photographed in the arms of the men who made them. These portraits, staged on dusty Johannesburg streets and loading docks, depict local artisans and informal traders in militant poses. The imagery is crisp, stylized, cinematically lit and oversaturated — Robert Capa by way of GQ.

Ralph Ziman and The Team, “The MiG-21," 2025. Photo: Mauricio Hoyos.

There’s no denying the pageantry of these images, but their politics are knottier than the glib anti-violence message they purport to advocate. Ziman doesn’t hide his aesthetic attraction to these weapons. “They’re beautiful objects,” he has said, an adolescent confession that threads through the entire project.

The photographs leverage precisely the kind of iconography they claim to critique: the heroic pose, the swaggering soldier, the lone gunman romanticized in global pop culture. They never satirize the fetish so much as they revel in it. It’s more Gen-X irony than camp.

I found it all a touch grotesque. Recasting AK-47s in beads does not rob them of menace so much as aestheticize that menace, refashioning death into décor. The artisans striking the poses are real men, with histories far more complex than these images allow. They are enlisted in a visual narrative that oscillates between homage and exploitation, not unlike the warlords and revolutionaries whose images once circulated with similar iconic mystique. That the guns are nonfunctional is irrelevant; their symbolic firepower remains intact.

The second iteration of this project, the “Casspir Project,” escalated the critique by leaning harder into spectacle. The beaded mine-resistant ambush protected vehicle becomes more flamboyant, the production more mythic, and the original tension remains unresolved: Can you deconstruct a fetish, cultural or otherwise, by reproducing it in wire and beadwork?

This is where the “Casspir Project” moves beyond ironic détournement and into the terrain of haunted archaeology. If the AK-47s and the “Ghosts” photographs flirt with aesthetization, the “Casspir Project” — beaded bumper to bulletproof window — is where the full imperial circuit becomes visible in lurid, irrefutable detail. The weapon-as-talisman is replaced by the system-as-monster.

Ralph Ziman and The Team, “MiG-21” a close-up view of the MiG-21’s beaded cockpit. Photo Mauricio Hoyos

Designed in apartheid-era South Africa to patrol and brutalize Black townships, the Casspir vehicle was a symbol of racial domination cast in steel and elevated on massive tires. That the United States, decades later, acquired these very vehicles for counterinsurgency during its ultimately failed campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, then trickled them down as military surplus to domestic police departments, is more than just historical irony. It’s what Aimé Césaire called the "boomerang effect" of colonial violence: What is tested on the periphery returns, mechanized, to the core.

Ziman, to his credit, captures this recursive horror not through didactics, but through spectacle so garish it can’t be ignored. The beaded “Casspir Project,” unveiled outside a gallery in Brooklyn in 2018 forced a confrontation. Viewers were drawn in by its jewel-toned allure, only to be gut-punched by the realization that this exact model had recently patrolled Ferguson and other Black communities under the pretense of "keeping order."

In this context, the beadwork ceased to feel like decorative camouflage. It became funerary. The vehicle, adorned with thousands of hours of communal labor, was not neutralized so much as embalmed. It symbolizes a tomb for the myth of Western innocence, proof of the continuity between colonial policing abroad and racist violence at home.

So yes, Ziman’s work traffics in spectacle, but it also operates, yet more directly, as bait. The glitter invites you, but what you encounter is the soft underbelly of empire: a pattern of exported repression returning to selectively devastate its own citizens. In this light, the “Casspir Project” is more than an “awareness campaign.” It is a Trojan horse of memory, rolling uninvited into the very streets that still don’t want to reckon with what they’ve inherited.

Ralph Ziman and The Team, Afrofuturistic flight suits.

Which brings us to the exhibition of Ziman’s beaded “MiG-21 Project” at the Museum of Flight in Seattle. This choice of venue is not just poignant, it’s surgical. If the “Casspir Project” was a ghostly return of colonial violence onto American streets, the “MiG-21 Project” installation functions more like a grinning reincarnation slipping quietly into the belly of the war machine itself. To house this encrusted relic of the Cold War just beyond the corporate sanctum of Boeing — a company whose tech has delivered everything from napalm to "precision" drone strikes in the name of democracy — is a masterstroke of silent confrontation.

For added irony, I was told during the press preview that some guests were asking the crew during installation if the rainbow-colored warplane was in honor of Pride month. My radical queer forebears are no doubt spinning faster than a jet turbine in their graves.

And of course, Boeing doesn’t stand alone. It is simply the most visible cog in a system where industrial-scale killing has been so successfully aestheticized, bureaucratized, and distanced from its potential and actual effects that even its museums become family-friendly. The Museum of Flight is a cathedral to American aerospace glory, from early barnstormers of the 1920s to the Space Shuttle era, with tidy plaques and awe-struck schoolchildren tracing the lineage of flight as if there were no payload, no consequence, no meat and bone on the receiving end.

Drawn in by the “MiG-21 Project’s” spectacular craft and color, we are left standing before the polished carcass of a killer, one whose DNA is so reciprocal it cannot really be considered foreign at all, despite being made by “the other side” during the Cold War. The MiG-21 was the Soviets’ counterpart to the American military-industrial sublime. Its deployment across Africa, Asia, and Latin America mirrors the same extractive logic, the same imperial gestures, if with different flags.

Ralph Ziman and The Team, “The MiG-21 Project.”

The problem is no longer personal. It’s cultural. It’s systemic. It’s the lethal banality of a society that has made war its subtext and entertainment its delivery mechanism.

In that sense, the “MiG-21 Project” is less memorial than memento mori. Not just for the Cold War dead, but for the very belief that spectacle can remain separate from consequence.

What initially looks like a glimmering critique of power curdles into something more damning. Not of Ziman, not even of the spectacle itself, but of the system that requires it. Ziman, to his credit, isn’t hiding the scaffolding. This is not a cynical enterprise. He’s not auctioning war kitsch at Basel for seven figures. If anything, “Weapons of Mass Production” is a gesture of desperation masquerading as pageantry, a sincere attempt to revalue labor, history, and violence by giving artisans both platform and pay.

In its early stages, the project was a way to redirect money toward craftspeople. Now, through a foundation, it formalizes that commitment. And that’s the unbearable part. Because even this earnest, collaborative attempt to confront empire and elevate the people it crushes is still only possible if the trauma is dressed up, adorned, neutered, rendered into spectacle. Still only viable if it draws clicks, tickets, donors, curators, museum boards. Still subject to the grotesque economy of attention that governs art in the Global North.

The bead workers themselves are primarily migrants, survivors of economic collapse who live precariously in Johannesburg and beyond, and I daresay they are not naïve. They understand that they are being asked to decorate the very forms that had hunted or exiled them, and it is clear that they have made something joyful of the labor. Layer on that the bitter irony that Trump’s administration has twice refused their visas to accompany their handiwork. Meanwhile, refugee status has been granted to white Afrikaners based on a revisionist history grounded in naked white supremacism.

Ralph Ziman and The Team, Afrofuturistic flight suits.

The “MiG-21 Project” workers also understand, with ruthless clarity, that this is how the world listens: not to testimony, not to truth, but to beauty, such as it is. They must reconstitute their pain in glass and wire, to be consumed under track lighting by people who will leave the exhibition and pass by a Boeing billboard on the way to brunch.

So the final indictment is not of Ziman, whose faults are visible and navigable, but of the moral economy of the art world. An economy that tends not to see the very objects of artists’ critiques until the suffering is made beautiful. That insists the colonized must perform their wounds as objects of wonder. That forces resistance into the shape of seduction and calls it “dialogue.”

In this sense, “Weapons of Mass Production” is an accidental documentary of what the system demands in order to acknowledge the harm it continues to administer. A funeral where the corpse must sing.

T.s. Flock is a writer and arts critic based in Seattle and co-founder of Vanguard Seattle.