One of Cornelia Parker’s best known works is Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991). To make the piece, the English artist had the British Army blow up a shed full of toys and gardening tools. She then suspended hundreds of the scorched objects from the ceiling. “There’s something about the explosion as a piece of iconography,” Parker told The Guardian. “Why do little boys pick up a stick and pretend it’s a gun? The want to destroy things seems to be part of our nature. Otherwise violence wouldn’t exist.” This Tate retrospective brings together many of Parker’s large-scale, violence-inflected installation pieces—including Cold Dark Matter. Her embroidery, films, and prints are on view as well. —Jensen Davis