26:86 Collective Pripyat Exhibition

In April 2016 to mark the 30th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster. A group of artists called the 26:86 Collective, including photographers and graphic designers, spent a week in the Chernobyl Exclusion zone visiting the abandoned town of Pripyat as well as the power station itself. On returning to the UK, a body of work was created in response to our visit. This work was exhibited in Middlesbrough in The House of BLAH BLAH between 2nd December 2016 and 12th January 2017, and Hartlepool Art Gallery between 9th September 2017 and 11th November 2017. The Work produced by Nicholas Young as part of the 26:86 Collective used the methodology of his Reductionist Manifesto to tell the story of the Chernobyl disaster. To make the story more relevant to a 21st century UK audience, he used a map of Great Britain showing all the working nuclear power stations on the 26th April 1986. And the 50 mile exclusion zones that would have taken effect in the aftermath of a meltdown like the one at Chernobyl. In the Manifesto, Rectuctionism is defined as ‘story telling through absence’. What is absent in this story are the large part of the country that would become ‘absent’. On the 7th April 2017 the 26:86 Collective staged a guerrilla exhibition at the ‘Palace of Culture’ in the abandoned city of Pripyat in Ukraine. The exhibition includes images of mixed media, photography, photomontage and collage. The exhibition was taken back into the Chernobyl exclusion zone, the place that inspired the artwork