Cassie Packard reviewsDisobedient Objects, an exhibition at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum devoted to examining “the powerful role of objects in movements for social change”:

The disobedient objects in the exhibition range from the more tactically frivolous, like the [inflatable] cobblestones [from a 2012 May Day demonstration in Berlin-Kreuzberg], to the blindingly necessary, like DIY tear gas masks. They are largely the products of various left-wing grassroots social movements, though a few objects made in service of paramilitaries — but questionably dressed in the show’s glamorizing rhetoric of left-wing activism — make it into the mix. On the whole, the exhibition is right on trend, combining a growing public interest in design activism with a recent popularization of “object”-centered museum exhibitions and publications. …

In one section of the exhibition is a collection of handmade “book blocs,” a functional riff on the riot shield in which…