Ralph Ziman estimates he was 13 or 14 years old the first time he had a gun pulled on him in anger.<\/p>\n
It was the mid-1970s, and he was with friends outside a shopping mall in the northern suburbs of his hometown of Johannesburg, South Africa.<\/p>\n
Someone may have looked the wrong way at a stranger\u2019s girlfriend \u2013 his memory is fuzzy.<\/p>\n
What isn\u2019t fuzzy is the sight of that stranger pointing a .45 Magnum in their direction.<\/p>\n
Luckily, the situation de-escalated, and everyone walked away that day.<\/p>\n
But Ziman estimates by the time he was 50, he\u2019d had a gun pulled on him 15 to 20 times.<\/p>\n
\u201cI have to consider myself really lucky,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Unsurprisingly, he said he\u2019s \u201calways been very anti-gun.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ziman is a commercial photographer and filmmaker-turned-artist who resides in Los Angeles today.<\/p>\n
For over a decade, he has made weapons the focus of his work, using tens of millions of hand-threaded beads to turn artifacts of war into artworks.<\/p>\n
\u201cI want to talk about the proliferation of weapons around the world and the militarisation of police forces,\u201d he explained.<\/p>\n
His series \u201cWeapons of Mass Production\u201d recently concluded with Ziman\u2019s most ambitious work to date: an entire fighter jet.<\/p>\n
Each artwork in the series has its own connection to South Africa\u2019s recent past, and together they comprise a beautiful, subversive meditation on a nation\u2019s history of violence.<\/p>\n
First, he created dozens of mock AK-47 rifles in 2013, adding beads to a wire frame.<\/p>\n
The AK-47, Ziman said, started as \u201ca weapon of liberation\u201d during the apartheid years, then post-apartheid, \u201cstarted showing up in bank robberies, cash-in-transit robberies, home invasions, and carjackings.\u201d<\/p>\n
Next, in 2016, Ziman moved on to bedecking a Casspir \u2013 a heavily armored, mine-resistant vehicle that was created for the South African police and deployed in townships, which became \u201ca hated symbol of apartheid,\u201d he explained.<\/p>\n
In 2019, Ziman took on the challenge of beading an entire MiG-21.<\/p>\n
Why he chose the Soviet era fighter jet \u2013 the most produced military jet in the world \u2013 requires a little more explanation.<\/p>\n
In the 1980s, South Africa was involved in both the Angolan Civil War (1975-2002) and the South African Border War (1966-1990).<\/p>\n
The Cold War proxy conflicts pulled in multiple entities, including Cuba, which flew MiG-21s against South Africa\u2019s air force, inflicting losses in what proved a costly venture, financially and politically, for South Africa.<\/p>\n
Ziman and a team of over 100 artisans took more than five years to complete the artwork, which was revealed at The Museum of Flight in Seattle this summer.<\/p>\n
First, Ziman had to acquire a jet, which was sourced from a military contractor in Lakeland, Florida.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was in pieces and not in great condition, but it was absolutely perfect for us,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Ziman\u2019s team removed the engine, loaded the rest onto a flatbed truck, and took it to his studio in LA.<\/p>\n
Much of the design work was completed on the plane itself, using sheets of paper stuck to its aluminum panels.<\/p>\n
These sheets would be detailed using colored tape, then removed and shipped to South Africa.<\/p>\n
There, artisans from Zimbabwean and Ndebele communities in Johannesburg, KwaZulu-Natal, and Mpumalanga provinces began to recreate the panels in beads.<\/p>\n
The largest of the panels was over 20 feet wide and weighed 30-40 pounds once completed.<\/p>\n
The team estimates the jet, which is 51 feet long and 24 feet wide, is covered in approximately 35 million beads.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s no mechanised way of doing this; everything on that plane is 100% handmade,\u201d said Ziman.<\/p>\n
\u201cI can\u2019t even begin to think about the hours that have gone into it.\u201d<\/p>\n
There are easier, quicker ways of adding a splash of color.<\/p>\n
Why beads?<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019d always loved beadwork,\u201d said Ziman.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019d grown up with it; I had an Ndebele nanny who always brought us beaded stuff.”<\/p>\n
\u201cEven though it took a tremendous amount of skill and this tremendous effort to make anything out of beads, it was looked down on. I always wanted to elevate it to being a fine art.\u201d<\/p>\n
Many of the artisans employed by Ziman are part of Anointed Hands, a collective of beadworkers overseen by Thenjiwe Pretty Nkogatsi.<\/p>\n
\ufeff\u201cShe is intensely passionate about keeping these beading skills alive in the Ndebele community,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Preserving the livelihoods of these artisans became paramount during the Covid-19 pandemic, when other work dried up, said Ziman.<\/p>\n
But \u201cWeapons of Mass Production\u201d is also out to help the next generation.<\/p>\n
Through DTCare, the charity arm of international logistics firm DTGruelle (which supported the MiG-21 project), 25 of the artisans\u2019 children and other young people are receiving sponsorship for their education.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe will pay for them through school, through university \u2026 as far as they want to go,\u201d said Ziman.<\/p>\n
So far, scholarship students have studied medicine, nursing, and fashion design, and one even plays for Zimbabwe\u2019s under-21 cricket team, the artist added, beaming.<\/p>\n
The MiG-21 will go up for sale after a US tour, he said, with proceeds funding the education program, as well as art therapy for children in Ukraine.<\/p>\n
\u201cI love the idea that we take this thing that was built in the Soviet Union \u2026 has been donated to us, and we can sell it and put some of that money back into helping some of the civilian population who\u2019ve been so brutalized in the war (with Russia),\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
Despite his series looking into South Africa\u2019s past, Ziman believes it has ongoing relevance.<\/p>\n
The project, he said, \u201cis maybe even more pertinent now than when we started.\u201d<\/p>\n
He highlighted the Casspir police vehicle, one of the inspirations for US military MRAP (Mine Resistance Ambush Protected) vehicles used in the Second Gulf War.<\/p>\n
Hundreds of US military mine-resistant vehicles would eventually be made available to police departments through the Pentagon\u2019s 1033 Program, and some used on US streets against protestors during the Black Lives Matter movement.<\/p>\n
\u201cHistory doesn\u2019t just rhyme, it actually seems to repeat itself,\u201d said Ziman.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ralph Ziman estimates he was 13 or 14 years old the first time he had a gun pulled…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":215831,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[76,354,355,49,48,356,75],"class_list":{"0":"post-215830","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-ca","12":"tag-canada","13":"tag-design","14":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215830","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=215830"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215830\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/215831"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=215830"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=215830"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=215830"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}