Raining Blood

A largely hidden story of European expansion: the global arms trade, and which traces of it survive in European museum collections. Photographs from around 1900 show people in Africa and elsewhere holding modern firearms, while ethnographic collections hold bows, arrows and ceremonial weapons — the exhibition asks why the photographs and the museums tell different stories, and follows trade routes including Arthur Rimbaud's turn from poet to arms dealer supplying Emperor Menelik of Ethiopia.