Our installation “Iconography of Radioactivity” is currently exposed within “The environment of existence. Manifesto 2020” in the Lavra Art Gallery, Kyiv, Ukraine (Lavra lane, 9).
The whole project’s aim is to engage the art community to the environment and ecological issues that we have, but hesitate to admit its importance.
Our work is about the human attempt to conquer the nature and to master the unknown.
Over the past hundred years, humans have been repeatedly facing to the destructive action of radiation. This is the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, numerous nuclear weapons testing, the Chernobyl accident and Fukushima-1.
The peculiarity of the ionising radiation is that it penetrates the matter, accumulates and changes the nature of the matter. Radiation is impossible to feel, but it’s hard to hide from it.
We intentionally have used the X-rays for creation the series of radiographic images of food that was produced close to the exclusion zone. There are fruits, nuts, mushrooms and vegetables from Polissya. People living near the scene of Chernobyl explosion don’t always know whether the food is dangerous, how it was grown. The delicious food may be harmful to the human body.
Combining the syncretic approach and romantic conceptualism, we become the priests of the radioactive temple. After radiographic ceremony we have ate those sacred gifts intended for the Nuclear God.
The show will be running until April 5th. Feel free to visit if you are in Kyiv!
The published photo is a draft image for the whole installation.