Painting at the End of the World: Chornobyl and Artistic Exploitation

Forty years ago, on 26 April 1986, reactor 4 of the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded, scattering radioactive debris over a vast area of Ukraine and its neighbour Belarus, large areas of which were forcibly evacuated of their residents and remain so today. In the decades since the disaster, it has become a cultural touchstone, inspiring dozens of books, films, TV series, video games and artistic projects of varying intent, originality and insight. Some have explored it as a modern-day Promethean parable, while others absorb audiences in the terror of invisibly deathly radioactive forces let loose, or fascinate in the urban ruins of Chornobyl’s satellite town, Pripyat.

The Chornobyl accident soon drew writers and artists, but more recently it has become an increasingly popular stop on the itinerary for so-called ‘dark tourists’ following the opening of the vast exclusion zone around the plant to non-specialist visitors in 2011. Even before this there was significant illicit traffic, with visitors sometimes dubbing themselves ‘stalkers’ after Andrei Tarkovsky’s prescient 1979 film in which the protagonists cross a hazardous wasteland to reach a mysterious site known as the ‘Zone’.

Andrei Tarkovsky, Stalker, 1979, Orwocolor print. Photo: Joëlle Kost, ERC Advanced Grant FilmColors. Courtesy BFI National Film Archive

More than 73,000 people travelled there in 2021, and a peripheral industry of specialised hotels and tour companies has sprung up to support them. Dark tourism is financially lucrative, and there is now a developing industry related to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, even as the war continues to rage.

There is an evident symbiotic relationship between this kind of tourism and art inspired by the disaster, as each potentially feeds interest and investment in the other. HBO’s widely lauded 2019 miniseries about the disaster helped introduce Chornobyl to a younger audience, as has the huge success of the Stalker video game series (based on the novel Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, on which Tarkovsky’s novel was based), set in the exclusion zone. Reflecting this interest there have been steps towards turning the zone itself into a sort of cultural destination itself, at least prior to the Russian invasion. These have included events like Valeriy Korshunov’s Artefact project which reimagined Pripiyat as a digital sculpture using projection and other special effects, and Oleh Ataiant’s Made in Chornobyl project, which invited two dozen artists to make work in the exclusion zone for an exhibition at his gallery.

Kazuma Obara, Exposure, 2015, Ukraine (series). © Courtesy the artist

However, the growing popular and artistic interest in Chornobyl raises the question, when does a cultural response to a terrible event exceed a legitimate interest and become potentially exploitative? For all the comparisons of the abandoned city of Pripyat to ancient Rome’s volcanically entombed city of Pompeii, the Chernobyl disaster is only half a life distant, and many of those who directly experienced the disaster are still living, while its radioactive legacies continue to affect the health and lives of people who were born decades later. Judging the degree to which engagement with such an event is exploitative is a fraught task, and one I think best left to Ukrainians as the primary inheritors of Chornobyl's legacy. But thinking about the intent and orientation of artworks may hold valuable insights for other examples of what we might call this ‘dark art’ centred on human suffering.

And suffering is the problem with a significant number of artistic works about Chornobyl, in that they become fixated on things or ideas that occlude the fundamentally human dimensions of the disaster. For example, many of the photographic series made in the exclusion zone, like Jane and Louise Wilson's Atomgrad (Nature Abhors a Vacuum) or Nadav Kander’s Half Life, can’t escape the magnetic draw of Pripyat’s ruins, and only tangentially remind us that these were once people’s homes and workplaces. A similar although different issue lies in some of the more conceptual works which have been made in response to the disaster, such as Alice Miceli’s Chernobyl Project, which captures images of the zone’s radiation on photographic films, in that the cleverness required of conceptual artworks again has a tendency to obscure the human toll.

Claire Baker, Babushka in Fabulous Housecoat, from Red Thread, 2022. Photo: Craig McCann-McMillan. Courtesy the artist

There are also works that are cognisant of this effect and which for the most part avoid it. Donald Weber’s Bastard Eden, Our Chernobyl, for example, eschews the usual sights and sites of the exclusion zone, instead seeking to answer the not-so-simple question, what does life look like in a post-nuclear world? Likewise, Kazuma Obara’s Exposure changes the focus to the people who have lost so much from the disaster. Using analogue film sourced from the ruins of Pripyat, Obara photographed people displaced by the disaster after meeting one of them at an exhibition opening. Long term exposure to the elements has degraded the film, resulting in images that are ghostly impressions of their subject matter. Claire A. Baker’s textile work, The Red Thread, centres on the elderly women who have returned to the zone, and exists alongside an ongoing Chornobyl Archive she is building of embroidery from the exclusion zone.

The territory in which Chornobyl sits has had an exceptionally hard history, which extends back far before 1986. The Belarussian journalist and oral historian Svetlana Alexevich, a chronicler of war and disaster across eastern Europe and Russia, has said of this history that its ‘suffering is our capital, our natural resource’. To an extent then it must also be for those who suffered most from the disaster, and those who inherited its consequences most directly, to decide how to exploit this ‘resource’ and to say what degree of exploitation of it goes too far.