The RA Summer exhibition 2016 was curated by Richard Wilson the central concept was to focus on the work of collaborative duo's. Our photographic and sculptural work explores the thematics of dark tourism, using yardsticks as a forensic and literal measure, an act of register for the viewer, the photographs are often centered on difficult to access sites and buildings, which are imbued with the presence and ideology of the original occupants.
It comprised of a double hang on either side of the grand staircase entrance. Displaying a series of six images called "Atomgrad" (Nature Abhors a Vaccum) (2010), photographic c-type hand prints depicting the abandoned and now almost entirely uninhabited town of Pripyat, situated within the 30km wide Exclusion Zone around the site of the 1986 disaster. The works take their title from term used by Ukrainian locals to refer to the former ‘Atomic City’ founded in 1970 to house workers from the nearby Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, and deserted just sixteen years later. The photographs document the exclusion zone of deserted, abandoned - civic and public buildings, the People’s Palace, hotel, kindergaten, swimming pool, cinema.
The work explores the notion of dark tourism. The sites are constantly measured and monitored for radiation. Yet tourists can go. Imagine this city as a utopian idea, a place where the idea of progress would happen through the wealth created by nuclear power. Instead, it’s empty, devastated. It was built mainly in the 1970s and completed just before the explosion. The photographs encourage us to stare back into the past, into the empty manmade spaces, yet the yardsticks (a means of measurement now fallen into disuse, much like the buildings themselves) play with notions of association, interpretation and memory on material fact, on that which is recorded, measured, articulated and analyzed.
Hinting towards the historic relevance of the "future ruin" and manifesting an Imperialist past in the present the measures also point to the architecture of forensics and camouflage (as well as the obsolete) because of their imperial standard: the yard (0.9144 of a metre), or 36 inches.