Chornobyl and caricatures would seem to be incompatible things. Caricatures are funny, but poking fun at Chornobyl would never occur to any of the globe’s inhabitants. But 252 caricaturists from 45 countries managed to find an approach to this tragic topic, the theme of the VI International Competition “Independence” focusing on ecology and the Chornobyl tragedy, which recently opened at the Chornobyl National Museum.
The artists succeeded in creating a sensation. Their caricatures make people’s skin crawl, and not only of those who live in direct proximity to the reactor that exploded. Visitors can still see the 100 best works. The general mood is definitely pessimistic, not only a local Chornobyl mood, but a global one as well: the earth turning into a nuclear fungus, trees in brick and iron vases, apes urinating on a statue to Darwin, Neptune sitting in his kingdom among rubbish heaps, an excavator digging a pit underneath itself, or just a sky framed with a mourning band.
The artists from Western Europe and Asia drew mainly on global topics, while our Ukrainian artists focused mostly on the theme of radiation. Three black vanes on a yellow background passed from one caricature to another, together with all sorts of mutants — from abstract rainbow ones to very brutal-looking ones. One caricature shows a one-eyed boy (his single eye is in the middle of his forehead, like the Cyclops’s) proffering his passport stating that the Cyclops-boy was born in Chornobyl in 1987.
Isn’t this too cruel for those children who were born in the Zone in the first years after the catastrophe? Most of them have two eyes, in the usual place, near ordinary noses above ordinary lips. None of the caricatures portraying mutants won any prize. I think the vanes were the most successful: instead of the sun, they rise above a village at cockcrow.
All three winners are from Ukraine. “The jury decided that our people feel this theme much more brilliantly and interestingly, that the Ukrainian artists have a more non- standard approach to Chornobyl. Maybe it’s because the Chornobyl theme is very close to us,” the deputy director of the Chornobyl museum, Hanna Korolevska, told The Day.
“I like this picture. It reflects our people’s attitude to the tragedy: we are surviving, trying not to think about the tragedy.” Korolevska’ favorite drawing, by Heorhii Maiorenko, is truly wonderful. People in Ukrainian national costumes are jumping over the burning reactor like young people jumping over bonfires on Ivan Kupalo’s day [Midsummer Eve’s night].
One of the prizes was awarded to Vasyl Vozniuk’s caricature portraying men in gasmasks rushing from an unkempt woman dressed in a Ukrainian costume. About 20 German schoolchildren entered the museum at the same time as The Day’s reporters. They looked at the caricatures one by one, seriously, with suprise, silently, with sorrow, as though they too are called the Chornobyl-born, like our young people, who are going to be issued milk to counter the “harmfulness,” but never receiving it.
“All the visitors to our museum are very much interested in the topic and moved by it,” Korolevska says. “They feel great compassion, even casual visitors. They come in, look around, and then ask the guide to tell them more; to see more. Foreigners come and we don’t have a guide who knows their language. But everything is clear without any words! People that come from far away leave with eyes full of tears.”
