Ralph Ziman estimates he was 13 or 14 years old the first time he had a gun pulled on him in anger. 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. Someone may have looked the wrong way at a stranger’s girlfriend – his memory is fuzzy. What isn’t fuzzy is the sight of that stranger pointing a .45 Magnum in their direction.
Luckily the situation de-escalated, and everyone walked away that day. But Ziman estimates by the time he was 50 he’d had a gun pulled on him 15 to 20 times. “I have to consider myself really lucky,” he said. Unsurprisingly, he said he’s “always been very anti-gun.”
Ziman is a commercial photographer and filmmaker-turned-artist who resides in Los Angeles today. 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.
“I want to talk about the proliferation of weapons around the world and the militarization of police forces,” he explained.
His series “Weapons of Mass Production” recently concluded with Ziman’s most ambitious work to date: an entire fighter jet.
Each artwork in the series has its own connection to South Africa’s recent past, and together they comprise a beautiful, subversive meditation on a nation’s history of violence.
First, he created dozens of mock AK-47 rifles in 2013, adding beads to a wire frame. The AK-47, Ziman said, started as “weapon of liberation” during the apartheid years, then post-apartheid “started showing up in bank robberies, cash-in-transit robberies, home invasions (and) carjackings.”
Next, in 2016, Ziman moved on to bedecking a Casspir van. The Casspir, a heavily armored, mine-resistant van, was created for the South African police and deployed in townships, becoming “a hated symbol of apartheid,” he explained.
In 2019, Ziman took on the challenge of beading an entire MiG-21. Why he chose the Soviet era fighter jet – the most produced military jet in the world – requires a little more explanation. 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 conflicts pulled in multiple entities, including Cuba, which flew MiG-21s against South Africa’s air force, inflicting loses in what proved a costly venture, financially and politically, for South Africa.
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.
First, Ziman had to acquire a jet, which was sourced from a military contractor in Lakeland, Florida.
“It was in pieces and not in great condition, but it was absolutely perfect for us,” he said. Ziman’s team removed the engine, loaded the rest onto a flatbed truck and took it to his studio in LA.
Much of the design work was completed on the plane itself, using sheets of paper stuck to its aluminum panels. These sheets would be detailed using colored tape, then removed and shipped to South Africa. There, artisans from Ndebele communities in Johannesburg, KwaZulu-Natal and Mpumalanga provinces began to recreate the panels in beads.
The largest of the panels were over 20 feet wide and weighed 30-40 pounds once completed. The team estimates the jet, which is 51 feet long and 24 feet wide, is covered in approximately 35 million beads.
“There’s no mechanized way of doing this, everything on that plane is 100% handmade,” said Ziman. “I can’t even begin to think about the hours that have gone into it.”
There are easier, quicker ways of adding a splash color. Why beads?
“I’d always loved beadwork,” said Ziman. “I’d grown up with it; I had an Ndebele nanny who always brought us beaded stuff.
“Even 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.”
Many of the artisans employed by Ziman are part of Anointed Hands, a collective of beadworkers overseen by Thenjiwe Pretty Nkogatsi. “She is intensely passionate about keeping these beading skills alive in the Ndebele community,” he said.
Preserving the livelihoods of these artisans became paramount during the Covid-19 pandemic, when other work dried up, said Ziman. But “Weapons of Mass Production” is also out to help the next generation.
Through DTCare, the charity arm of international logistics firm DTGruelle (which supported the MiG-21 project), 25 of the artisans’ children and other young people are receiving sponsorship for their education.
“We will pay for them through school, through university … as far as they want to go,” said Ziman. So far, scholarship students have studied medicine, nursing and fashion design, and one even plays for Zimbabwe’s under-21 cricket team, the artist added, beaming.
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.
“I love the idea that we take this thing that was built in the Soviet Union … 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’ve been so brutalized in the war (with Russia),” he added.
Despite his series looking into South Africa’s past, Ziman believes it has ongoing relevance. The project, he said, “is maybe even more pertinent now than when we started.”
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. Hundreds of US military mine-resistant vehicles would eventually be made available to police departments through the Pentagon’s 1033 Program, and some used on US streets against protestors during the Black Lives Matter movement.
“History doesn’t just rhyme, it actually seems to repeat itself,” said Ziman.
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