To mark the 80th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6th and 9th August 1945, Imperial War Museums (IWM) are presenting I Saw the World End by leading artist Es Devlin in collaboration with her long-term studio colleague Machiko Weston.
Commissioned by IWM in 2020, I Saw the World End is a digital diptych which responds to the moment the nature and consequences of war were irrevocably redefined, reflecting on the impact of the event from both a Japanese and a British perspective. The artwork highlights precise moments of destruction within a ten-second period – the time it took for the nuclear weapons to eliminate both Japanese cities. The work will be presented on Piccadilly Lights, Europe’s largest LED on 6th August 2025, the anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
The United States detonated two nuclear weapons over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6th and 9th August 1945, respectively. The two bombings killed over 100,000 people directly, most of whom were civilians, and caused thousands more to die of their injuries or the after-effects of radiation. The detonation of these weapons remains the first and only time they have been used in war.
Artists Es Devlin and Machiko Weston said,
“We are exploring this moment at a range of scales simultaneously: the timeline of the physical impact: from one millionth of a second to three seconds to ten seconds, by which time the majority of the physical destruction was complete; as well as the timeline of the mythological impact: from our grandparents, to our parents to our own perception of this moment and how it shaped the concept of ‘the end of the world’ and ‘human extinction’ within the cultural traditions of Japan and Britain.”
There will be a showing of the 10 minute work at 8.45pm tonight Wednesday 6th August 2025 on the giant LED screen, Piccadilly Lights, Piccadilly Circus, London, W1D 7ET.
About
Es Devlin, artist and designer, (born in London in 1971), views an audience as a temporary society and invites public participation in communal choral works. Her canvas ranges from public sculptures and installations at V&A, Somerset House, Serpentine, Barbican and outside at Tate Modern, Trafalgar Square, Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan and the Lincoln Centre, to kinetic stage designs at the Royal Opera House, the National Theatre and the Metropolitan Opera, as well as Olympic Ceremonies, Super-Bowl half-time shows, and monumental illuminated stage sculptures for large scale stadium concerts.
She is the subject of a monographic book and retrospective exhibition, An Atlas of Es Devlin, shown at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York 2023 to 2024. In 2020 Devlin became the first female architect of the UK Pavilion at a World Expo, conceiving a building which used AI to co-author poetry with visitors on its 20-metre diameter facade. Her practice was documented in the 2015 Netflix series Abstract: The Art of Design.
She is a fellow of the Royal Academy of Music, University of the Arts London and a Royal Designer for Industry at the Royal Society of Arts. She has been awarded The London Design Medal, three Olivier Awards, a Tony Award, an Ivor Novello Award, doctorates from the Universities of Bristol and Kent and a CBE. She is the first British woman to the receive the Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in 2025 and is Visiting Professor of Contemporary Theatre at the University of Oxford.
Machiko Weston is an artist and designer who lives and works in York. She was Associate Designer at Es Devlin Studio for over a decade and worked on multiple exhibitions and stage projects around the world including Die Tote Stadt at the Finnish National Opera and Tokyo’s New National Theatre, The Lehman Trilogy at the National Theatre and New York’s Park Avenue Armory, High Tide for Carmen at the Victoria & Albert Museum. Core interests in her personal art practice include visual storytelling, perspective in scaled model-making, and the relationship between Japanese and British culture.
IWM (Imperial War Museums) tells the story of people who have lived, fought and died in conflicts involving Britain and the Commonwealth since the First World War.
Our unique collections, made up of the everyday and the exceptional, reveal stories of people, places, ideas and events. Using these, we tell vivid personal stories and create powerful physical experiences across our five museums that reflect the realities of war as both a destructive and creative force. We challenge people to look at conflict from different perspectives, enriching their understanding of the causes, course and consequences of war and its impact on people’s lives.
IWM’s five branches which attract over 2 million visitors each year are IWM London, which has recently transformed with new, permanent and free Second World War Galleries, The Holocaust Galleries and the Blavatnik Art, Film and Photography Galleries; IWM North, housed in an iconic award-winning building designed by Daniel Libeskind; IWM Duxford, Britain’s best preserved wartime airfield; Churchill War Rooms, housed in Churchill’s secret headquarters below Whitehall; and the Second World War cruiser HMS Belfast. www.iwm.org.uk
At 783.5 square metres, over 4k resolution, Piccadilly Lights is Europe’s largest LED screen. This screening is part of Piccadilly Lights’ cultural programme. The screen space is donated by Landsec, owner of Piccadilly Lights, working with Ocean Outdoor. Piccadilly Lights is the world’s No 1 advertising Digital Out of Home screen. A national landmark, it is one of the most visited, photographed and shared DOOH destinations in the world.
