Pripyat, Chernobyl (part 1/4) piece from my recent show in The Belltable Arts Centre, Limerick. The show, called “City Of The Future”, was a 4-screen video and sound installation, based on the empty city of Pripyat. I travelled to the Chernobyl exclusion zone in September 2007, and spent a week in Pripyat filming and recording sounds. Initially I made a single-screen experimental film piece called “Pripyat” which has been screened at several international film festivals, and is also here on youtube. Almost a year later, I began working again on the footage I’d shot inside Pripyat, to develop it into a gallery exhibition. The four different screens are seen at the same time here, each in a different quarter of the frame, to give an idea of what it was like in the gallery. The 4 images took up the whole space, surrounding the viewer, the viewer, playing at the same time. “The city of Pripyat was once considered the finest place to live in the whole of the Soviet Union. A thoroughly modern city, it was built in 1970 to house the workers of the new Chernobyl nuclear Power plant and their families, and was once a happy home to 50000 people. In the aftermath of the accident in April 1986, the residents were instructed to pack one suitcase and told they would be returning in three days. One thousand buses were drafted in from all across the Soviet Union to take the residents of Pripyat out of their now highly contaminated home. They never returned. 21 years later Pripyat stands …

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