This is Not a Bomb - matériel culture and the arms trade

This chapter focusses on a series of complimentary gifts that Gibbon collected from arms fairs in London, Paris, and Abu Dhabi, 2014 – 2020 by masquerading as an arms trader. They include soft tanks, a toffee in a wrapper saying ‘welcome to hell’, a condom with the slogan ‘the ultimate protection’, and stress balls in the shape of grenades, a soldier’s head, and a bomb. Gibbon asks whether the gifts can be appropriated through art to give insights into the arms industry. The bomb-shaped stress ball does not look like a contemporary weapon. A black sphere with a string fuse, it is a symbol for a bomb, a sign. Soft and pliable, it embodies the shifting meanings of bombs in arms fairs as symbols of power, vehicles of profit, objects of exchange. The stress ball epitomises the arms industry’s disavowal of the material impact of weapons. Using Barad’s (2003) concept of materiality as a performance entangled with meaning, Gibbon argues that the gifts take part in the deceptive charades of the defence industry, where the material properties of weapons are disavowed. Gibbon contextualises her method of exhibiting the gifts in relation to the Dada readymade, and Magritte’s Treachery of Images, where spaces of art are used to highlight the material qualities of an object. She considers whether it is possible to use the gifts to reveal the commodification of weapons, or if they have the last laugh.

https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/spaces-of-war-war-of...