Ai Weiwei’s bombing mission

Ai Weiwei’s bombing mission

Daniel Nelson

Daisy Cutter, Little Boy, Fat Man, Spice: the nicknames sound friendly, affectionate. But they refer to aerial bombs and missiles.

The humour reflects a gleeful arrogance, the pleasure of power, and a way to humanise and deflect attention from the enormous destructive capacity of the weapons.

You can take these feelings further by walking over the outlines of 50 bombs and missiles that form the basis of Chinese activist and artist Ai Weiwei’s 1,000 square feet installation at the Imperial War Museum in London.

The images also decorate the outside of the staircase up from the atrium and are given dreadful scale by a soaring Nazi V2 rocket – though its towering terror is a flywhisk compared with the potential and actual death toll of the subsequent US and Soviet nuclear bombs.

The installation forms a dramatic entrance to the newly reopened museum, though it’s a pity that the rest of the Refugees season will not open until 24 September. Linking a century of bombs and missiles to people’s enforced flight will ground the work – and the weapons –in a grimmer, dirtier reality.

* History of Bombs is at the Imperial War Museum, Lambeth Road, SE1 until May 2021. Refugees: Forced to Flee, featuring stories of displacement from the First World War to the present day, opens on 24 September. It will include Life in a Camp, an immersive installation, and A Face to Open Doors, in which an artificial intelligence border guard will be placed at the museum and in Manchester streets, exploring a future where international movement is policed by intelligent machines. Info: https://www.iwm.org.uk/visits/iwm-london