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Paper short abstract:

The goal is to reveal the topic of the Chornobyl disaster and its consequences in Ukrainian art, as well as to find out through which images artists spoke about this problem and how the image and perception of the accident at the Chornobyl nuclear power plant changed from 1986 to the present day.

Paper long abstract:

Due to the silence of the disaster, a memory policy was not formed for a long time in the context of this disaster and the Exclusion Zone. The trauma remained unspoken, and the impact of the disaster on Ukrainian art was little studied.

I’ve analyzed Ukrainian photography, painting, sculpture, naive art, installations, and modern art, and separately such phenomena as the postmodern art of the association Parkomuna and the Painting Reserve (Живописний заповідник), the art of Maria Prymachenko. During my research, I found some symbols and topics that represent the Chornobyl catastrophe. But now with this experience of lost land, mysterious zone, and poisoned landscape – we should also talk about russian occupation in 2022, nuclear terrorism in Zaporizhzha NPP, and the destruction of the Kakhovka dam, another huge ecological catastrophe in Ukraine.

Yuriy Kosin depicted "catastrophic images" of abandoned villages. The art of Parkomuna artists (Savadov, Sechenko, Holosiy, Trubina, Hnylitsky, and others) depicted a new postmodern world that lives after the apocalypse and created new images because the old ones no longer worked and were destroyed by a radiation explosion. The artists of the Painting Reserve experienced a catastrophe as another destructive influence on the Ukrainian landscape, which is changing under the influence of historical upheavals. The construction of Chornobyl NPP was also a product of colonial power. As well as building reservoirs in Dnipro and now demolishing whole cities and villages in Donbas.