Ai Weiwei Exhibits 500 Cast-Iron Combat Helmets at Australia Museum

Ai Weiwei on Friday unveiled his commission for the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in Sydney: 500 cast-iron combat helmets arranged in ten orderly lines on the city’s busiest green space, Tallawoladah Lawn.

The 131-foot-long installation, titled Mushrooms, recalls various 20th-century combat helmets, complete with inner padding. The installation is arranged on an elevated platform split by a pedestrian walkway, making the work difficult for visitors to the famous harbor to miss. According to a statement from the artist, its title—like the curved lip of the helmet—alludes to “growth in darkness, nuclear mushroom clouds, and in Chinese, the term also suggests endless delays.”

“We continue to exist in a time where war and peace interchangeably assume each other’s roles, shaping the identity of our age. I hope this work prompts people to reflect on war and peace,” he said.

Mushrooms is the latest Neil Balnaves Tallawoladah Lawn Commission, named for the Australian philanthropist and businessman Neil Balnaves, who died in a boating accident near Tahiti in 2022, aged 77. The installation will remain on view for seven months, during which viewers may be moved to learn more about its inspiration: a controversy Germany provoked in 2022, when its government refused to provide weapons to Ukraine in the face of Russia’s full-scale invasion, instead offering some 5,000 helmets—a move mocked at the time by Kyiv as “an absolute joke.” But Mushrooms, as the artist told the Art Newspaper, is not a “political joke.”

Rather, it aims to “demonstrate how shallow an understanding today’s national leadership can have of the human condition and of what may happen in the future.”

Mushrooms follows the inaugural Neil Balnaves Tallawoladah Lawn Commission, awarded last year to British sculptor Thomas J. Price, who created Ancient Feelings. Price’s more than 10-foot-tall golden-bronze sculpture of a woman’s head gazed out toward Sydney Harbor, inviting viewers, in the artist’s words, to “reflect on the universal emotions and experiences that connect us all.”