My grandfather Igor, who unfortunately I did not have a chance to see, was in Chernobyl in 1986 as an engineer and liquidator of the accident. After receiving large doses of radiation, he died of blood cancer, leaving my grandmother Mila alone in a one-room apartment quartet, which was received as a reward for my grandfather’s work. My grandmother, however, had two close friends Valya and Ira, who worked together with Mila and Igor in the same RosAtom Ministry and who also connected their fate to tragedy. In Chernobyl, Valya worked for three months as a secretary, Ira went with her husband only for a few weeks. All three women in the result received the status of "Chernobyl Widows", irreparable health consequences, painful memories.
The accident at the Chernobyl NPP is a disease that has poisoned entire generations. The people who lived through all this horror, who took part in the liquidation, who saw everything in real life, have been forgotten and abandoned like blunders in history. All experienced memories have been incorporated into their way of life, into their typical one-room apartments. This work explores the intersection of present and past, the indistinguishable consequences of the catastrophe and the permanence of the place.
The installation is an image of a typical Khrushchev apartment in which Ira, Mila and Valya still live. Each heroine has her own room, which represents her perceptions of the past and today.
My grandfather Igor, who unfortunately I did not have a chance to see, was in Chernobyl in 1986 as an engineer and liquidator of the accident. After receiving large doses of radiation, he died of blood cancer, leaving my grandmother Mila alone in a one-room apartment quartet, which was received as a reward for my grandfather’s work. My grandmother, however, had two close friends Valya and Ira, who worked together with Mila and Igor in the same RosAtom Ministry and who also connected their fate to tragedy. In Chernobyl, Valya worked for three months as a secretary, Ira went with her husband only for a few weeks. All three women in the result received the status of "Chernobyl Widows", irreparable health consequences, painful memories.
The accident at the Chernobyl NPP is a disease that has poisoned entire generations. The people who lived through all this horror, who took part in the liquidation, who saw everything in real life, have been forgotten and abandoned like blunders in history. All experienced memories have been incorporated into their way of life, into their typical one-room apartments. This work explores the intersection of present and past, the indistinguishable consequences of the catastrophe and the permanence of the place.
The installation is an image of a typical Khrushchev apartment in which Ira, Mila and Valya still live. Each heroine has her own room, which represents her perceptions of the past and today.
Russian Carpets
1,4 m x 2,3 m
oil and drypoint, flock and screenprint
on primed canvas
2019
The disappearance of nationalities that arose a thousand or more years ago, is not only a cultural and historical, but also a political and moral tragedy. With the gradual disappearance of nationalities and their languages, humanity is irreversibly losing part of its culture, and civilization is becoming poorer. The irreversible nature of these processes leads to the fact that a whole layer of civilization disappears with its own thinking, perception of the world, ideas about human development. Unfortunately, the process of rapid and dangerous ethnic destruction has affected Russia, my country. Nations have long left and continue to leave their national lands and are moving to large industrial cities in Russia in order to provide for their families and live in more civilized conditions, at the same time, they are faced with a society in which they have to merge, forgetting about their native languages, their roots. Printed on canvases using the dry-point technique, the layout of a typical Russian one-room apartment in Khrushchevka symbolizes those harsh, oppressive conditions of society; red carpets with national symbols of the disappearance of nationalities, printed with flock using silk-screen printing, show that gradually forgotten cultures, languages and history.
