The Thousands

There’s always been something surreal about representing ghost towns on film. As though it can capture the ghosts of past or, like some surrealist cinema, imagine inhabitants. Sometimes inhabitants exist, whether they be three-eyed fish or albino alligators. When travelling by train through outer Siberia, the agoraphobic desolation provides ample thoughts about how people could actually survive here in the first place. Diana Thater’s exhibition, Chernobyl, explores these themes through the eerie movement of the camera and multi-faceted projection as Thater roams through the ‘Zone of Alienation’.

There are animals roaming around these zones of alienation, preferring open space to claustrophobic urbanisation and there are barren, humanless tundras that exude that sci-fi apocalypse feel that Hollywood has been great at imitating. This Los Angeles based artist, however, takes it one step further and ventures into a sick reality, knowing just how to vilify your senses. The Village Twin has nothing on her depiction of an abandoned cinema in Prypiat. Though Thater’s disjunctive use of video negates narration, the story seems loud and clear. The modern ruin just got a little more ruined.