Ralph Ziman estimates he was 13 or 14 when he first pulled the gun in rage. It was in the mid-1970s, and he was with a friend outside a shopping mall on the north suburbs of his hometown of Johannesburg, South Africa. Someone may have seen the wrong way to a stranger’s girlfriend – his memory is vague. Not fuzzy is the sight of the stranger pointing to .45 magnum in their direction.
Luckily, the situation escalated and everyone left that day. However, Ziman estimates that he had pulled the gun 15-20 times by the time he was 50 years old. “I have to think of myself as really fortunate,” he said. Naturally, he said, “It was always very anti-gun.”
Ziman is a commercial photographer and filmmaker who lives in Los Angeles today. For over a decade he has made weapons the focus of his work.
“I want to talk about the surge in weapons around the world and the militarization of police,” he explained.
His series, “The Weapons of Mass Production” recently ended with Ziman’s most ambitious work to date, the entire Fighter Jet.
Each artwork in the series has its own connection to the recent South African past, and together they form a beautiful and destructive meditation on the history of national violence.
First, he created dozens of mock AK-47 rifles in 2013, adding beads to the wireframe. According to Ziman, the AK-47 began as a “weapon of liberation” during the apartheid era, and then began to appear in post-apartheid “bank robberies, cash, transport robberies, and invasions of homes (and) carjacking.”
Next, in 2016, Ziman moved to Casspir Van’s Bedding. A heavily armored, mining resistant van, Kaspill was created for South African police and deployed in towns, becoming a “apartheid hate symbol.”
In 2019, Ziman took on the challenge of beading the entire MIG-21. It is a bit more explained why he chose Soviet-era fighter jets (the world’s most produced military jet). In the 1980s, South Africa was involved in both the Angola Civil War (1975-2002) and the South African Border War (1966-1990). The Cold War proxy conflict was drawn out by multiple entities, including Cuba, which flew MIG-21 against the South African Air Force, losing to what proved a financially and politically costly venture for South Africa.
Ziman and a team of over 100 artisans took over five years to complete the artwork. It was revealed this summer at the Flight Museum in Seattle.
First of all, Ziman had to get a jet. The jet was sourced from a military contractor in Lakeland, Florida.
“It was falling apart and not in great condition, but it was absolutely perfect for us,” he said. Ziman’s team removed the engine, loaded the rest into a flatbed truck and took it to a studio in LA.
Much of the design work was completed on the plane itself using sheets of paper stuck to aluminum panels. These sheets are described in detail using colored tape and then removed and shipped to South Africa. So artisans from the Nudebele community in Johannesburg, KwaZulu-Natal and Mpumalanga began recreating panels of beads.
The largest panels weighed over 20 feet wide and weighed between 30 and 40 pounds upon completion. The team estimates that the 51-foot-long, 24-foot-wide jet is covered with about 35 million beads.
“There’s no mechanized way to do this. Everything about that plane is 100% handmade,” Ziman said. “I can’t even start thinking about the time spent on it.”
There is an easy and quick way to add a splash color. Why beads?
“I’ve always loved beadwork,” Ziman said. “I grew up with that. I had an ndebele nanny who always brought us some beaded stuff.
“It took this enormous effort to make something out of so many skills and beads, but it was looking down. I always wanted to promote it to art.”
Many of the artisans employed by Ziman are part of the anointed hands and are a group of bead workers supervised by thenjiwe pretty nkogatsi. “She is extremely passionate about keeping these bead skills alive in the ndebele community,” he said.
Maintaining the livelihoods of these artisans has become most important during the Covid-19 pandemic, when other jobs were exhausted. However, “mass production weapons” are also being released to help the next generation.
Through DTCare, the charity division of international logistics company DTGRUELELE (supporting the MIG-21 project), 25 artisan children and other young people have been sponsored for education.
“We pay them through schools, colleges, as long as they want to go,” Ziman said. So far, scholarship students have studied medicine, nursing and fashion design and have played for Zimbabwe’s under 21 cricket team, and the artist has given them a beaming.
The MIG-21 will be sold after a tour in the US, he said.
“I love the idea of filming this thing built in the Soviet Union. It was donated to us. You can sell it and turn some of that money back to helping some of the civilians who have been so brutalized in the war,” he added.
Despite his series searching for South Africa’s past, he believes it has continued relevance. The project “may be even more suitable now than when we first started,” he said.
He highlighted the Caspill police vehicle, one of the inspirations for the US military MRAP (Mine Resistance Ambush Protection) vehicles used in the Second Gulf War. Hundreds of US military mining resistant vehicles will eventually be available to police stations through the Pentagon’s 1033 program, some of which will be used in U.S. cities against protesters during the Black Life Matter movement.
“It seems that history doesn’t just rhyme, it actually repeats itself,” Ziman said.
