Have you been to the zone yet? As a fan of Andrei Tarkovsky, especially his occult 1979 Stalker, my answer is a definite YES. In fact, in the past decade, I have visited the zone metaphorically, conceptually, and even physically. For Tarkovsky and his fans, of course, the zone is allegorical. However, in a more concrete sense, some of my recent published essays are also about the idea of the zone as a heterotopic
Is it possible to develop an aesthetics of resistance in a world that is dominated by spectacles sanctioned by the state and capital?
Le Monde, the Paris-based daily, reports on the censorship problems in this year’s Lianzhou Foto Festival. They estimate that at least 10% of the approximately 2,000 photographs, including several of my photographs, were censored in the exhibition. I spoke briefly with an editor from the paper: Festival de photographie : en Chine, l’art mystérieux de la censure
My solo exhibtion The Theater of War will open on December 1 as part of the 2018 Lianzhou Foto Festival. The exhibition draws on my ongoing investigation of the relation between aesthetics and military violence, nuclear fallout, and Cold War ruins. In his treatise On War published nearly two centuries ago, the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz deploys the idea of the “Theater of War” to analyze warfare. By
Let’s take a break from Cold War ruins and check out these abandoned factories from the post-socialist era.
The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is hardly a dead zone or time capsule. For these self-settlers who have moved back to their villages inside the zone illegally, life has to go on. Still, aside from their contaminated farmlands, memories of a better time are what they really cherished.
Oftentimes, after I’ve posted an image on social media, people would ask me about its location, even though they did not necessarily have the desire to go there. Somehow, I suspect that that curiorsity is driven by our desire to place a scene to a specific place and therefore insulate it from “our” world. But the truth is that these scenes are all coming from a place called the Planet
On that fateful morning of April 26, 1986, the supposedly state-of-the art Reactor 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Plant exploded during an experiment, releasing 400 times as much radiation material into the environment as that of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings. The accident ultimately led to the downfall the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, but not necessarily for the better. Today, the fallout of Chernobyl,
This sinkhole has swallowed its own history. All we know is that the drilling rig and equipment used by Soviet engineers collapsed as this giant sinkhole emerged in around 1971 or perhaps even as early as the 1950s. It is also unclear whether the engineers set the natural gas crater on fire intentionally, hoping that would exhaust all the natural gas in a few weeks, or that the fire started
Two years ago, the National Gallery of Canada, the Globe and Mail, and the Archive of Modern Conflict staged an exhibition called Cutline to interrogate the question of changing media technology, photojournalism, and archive in the (pre)digital age. Since then the Globe and Mail, Canada’s largest national newspaper, has moved to a new location within Toronto as planned. Its old facility, along with the public installation of the exhibition, has