Hanson-Heine adores the installation, erected by his father and a local sculptor in 1986, as an anti-war, anti-nuclear protest still relevant in the midst of the invasion of Ukraine. But he says Oxford City Council ignored his father’s other message this week when he set up a cultural heritage site in Headington, a suburb that makes a “special contribution” to the community. Bill Heine installed the shark without the approval of local officials because he believed they should not have the right to decide what art people see, and the council spent years trying to remove the sculpture. “Using the design device to preserve a historical symbol of design law violation is absurd at first sight,” Hanson-Heine, a quantum chemist, told the Associated Press. Bill Heine, an American expatriate who studied law at Oxford University, got the idea for the sculpture after hearing American warplanes fly over his house one night in April 1986. When he woke up the next morning, he learned that airplanes were on their way to bomb Tripoli in retaliation for Libya’s sponsorship of terrorist attacks against US troops. The image of a shark falling on the roof immortalized the shock that citizens should feel when bombs hit their homes, said Magnus Hanson-Heine. His father died in 2019. Heine and sculptor’s friend John Buckley made the large white glass wool and then placed it on August 9, the 41st anniversary of the US dropping an atomic bomb on Nagasaki. The shark’s anti-war message is just as important today, Henson-Heine said. “Obviously this is something that people in Ukraine are experiencing right now at a very real time,” he said. “But certainly when there are nuclear weapons on the scene, which have been my whole life, that is always a very real threat.”
