This event is a poetic reconsideration of memory about the Chornobyl disaster. The idea of the project emerged after the reading of Svetlana Alexievich Chornobyl Prayer which stirred up a sensation in France in the early 1990s. This book, written by a Belarusian dissident writer now living in Sweden), a collection of personal evidence from various people who had gone through the Chornobyl disaster, formed the basis of a play staged by Nicole Vautier in Grenoble, in which Clement took part as production designer.
Very much has been said, written, and filmed about the tragic Chornobyl page in the history of our country. Yet Valerie Clement creates, guided by her very personal impressions of Ukraine, and her own esthetic and emotional universe based on wholehearted sympathy with people who have found themselves on the verge of survival. Some of the photographs were taken in France and Switzerland by fresher actors or just very considerate people who became heroes and heroines of the story photographers told.
“Every image I reproduced is a frozen time span and a mute question: what exactly happened then? So you look for answers in their glances, facial expressions, and poses… There is no blood or wounds. There are no demands or condemnations. There is nothing but silence and loneliness,” Valerie Clement said in an interview.
The exhibit consists of 50 photo works executed in the author’s technique of multiple overlapping of different figures on the image, which creates an effect that resembles a painting. This series has not a shadow of an exotic alien woe, and even the well-known landscapes of the exclusion zone emerge in an entirely different, a little fantastic, light, and thus look like melancholic and penetrating figures in the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, the author of the book Frozen Time. In this book the famous movie director tells about his own film method based on understanding the course of time. Following him, Valerie Clement casts her look through the lens at the post-Soviet reality, which makes it possible to resurrect, for a moment, the perplexity and alienation that embraced this country in the 1980s-1990s and relive, at least for a second, the past as well as the present.
