By Sara Bright
An artist takes a Soviet MiG-21 fighter jet, a decommissioned killing machine, and covers it in 35 million tiny, hand-threaded beads.
It’s an incredible image, isn’t it? This sleek, brutal piece of Cold War technology, completely transformed into a shimmering, intricate, almost joyful object. It’s the final piece in a decade-long project by the South African artist Ralph Ziman, called “Weapons of Mass Production.” And the whole thing is a beautiful, deeply uncomfortable contradiction.
What are we looking at here? Is it a protest? An act of aesthetic defiance? Or is it just a very elaborate, very expensive way of decorating an old piece of military hardware?
At first, you think, maybe it’s a bit of a gimmick. The art world loves a big, shiny, headline-grabbing object. And a beaded fighter jet certainly qualifies. It’s the kind of thing that looks great on Instagram.
But then you dig a little deeper into the story behind it, and you realise it’s something else entirely. Something much more complicated, and much more personal.
Ziman grew up in apartheid-era Johannesburg. He says he had a gun pulled on him for the first time when he was about thirteen. And that by the time he was fifty, it had happened maybe twenty times. That’s not an abstract political statement. That’s a life lived under the constant, humming threat of violence. That’s the reality that informs this work.
And the weapons he chooses. They’re not random. They’re specific, loaded symbols from South Africa’s recent, bloody history. He started with AK-47s. The “weapon of liberation” that, after apartheid, became the tool of bank robbers and carjackers. Then he moved on to a Casspir, one of those armoured police vehicles that were a hated symbol of state oppression in the townships. And now, the MiG-21. A jet flown by Cuban forces against the South African air force during the Border War.
Each object is a ghost. A piece of a violent past, dragged out into the light.
And what does he do with them? He gives them to a team of over 100 artisans, mostly women from Zimbabwean and Ndebele communities, and they cover them in beads.
The whole thing feels a bit like an ancient, ritualistic act of cleansing. As if they’re trying to smother the violence of the object with a painstaking, almost absurd act of beauty. It’s like trying to patch up a deep wound with a thousand tiny, colourful stitches. You can still see the shape of the injury underneath, but it’s been transformed into something else. Something you can look at without flinching.
I remember seeing pictures of old, decommissioned tanks that had been turned into playgrounds for children. There’s a similar energy here. A refusal to let the object retain its original, menacing power. A deliberate, defiant act of repurposing.
And the process itself. That’s the key. This isn’t just about the finished object. It’s about the labour. He says there’s no mechanised way of doing it. Millions of beads, threaded by hand. He talks about the hours, the sheer, mind-numbing effort. Why? Why choose a method that is so deliberately slow, so inefficient?
Because the process is the point.
He says he always loved the traditional beadwork he grew up with, but that it was always looked down on. Not considered ‘fine art’. So this project is also about a different kind of violence. A cultural one. The quiet, insidious violence of colonial attitudes that decide which forms of creativity are valuable and which are not. By taking this ‘low’ craft and applying it to these symbols of ‘high’ military technology, he’s messing with our whole system of value. He’s asking, which is more powerful? The factory that can churn out a thousand guns? Or the hands that can spend five years transforming one of them into a thing of beauty?
Actually, scrap that. The most powerful thing about this project isn’t even the art. It’s the money.
Because what happens next? The beaded fighter jet gets exhibited in a museum, it goes on tour, and then it gets sold. And the proceeds go towards funding an education programme for the children of the artisans who made it. And to art therapy for children in Ukraine.
And this is where the whole thing clicks into place. It’s a complete, closed loop. He’s taking a symbol of destructive, state-sponsored violence, and through a massive act of collective, creative labour, he’s transforming it into a source of funding for education and healing. It’s a kind of alchemy. Turning lead into gold, but on a geopolitical scale.
So is it still a weapon? Or is it a sculpture? Is it a protest against the global arms trade, or a celebration of traditional craft?
The answer, of course, is that it’s all of those things at once. It’s a messy, complicated, beautiful and deeply hopeful project. It doesn’t offer any easy answers. It doesn’t pretend that you can erase a violent history just by covering it in pretty patterns. But it does suggest that it’s possible to take the ugliest things we create, and, with enough time, and enough effort, and enough tiny, patient acts of care, to make them into something that can, against all odds, do some good in the world. And in 2025, that feels like a radical idea.
