For AION, 2006, Cologne-based artist Jacob Kirkegaard ventured into Ukraine’s Zone of Exclusion, a nineteen-mile radius around the site of the Chernobyl nuclear-reactor disaster, and made ten-minute audio recordings inside four public structures—a swimming pool, a gymnasium, a school auditorium, and a church—abruptly abandoned after the 1986 catastrophe. By playing back the original audio into each building and re-recording it, repeating the process ten times, the artist’s “sonic time layering,” as he calls it, results in dynamic drones: Crescendos of rumbles, whirs, and crackles resound from these ostensibly “silent” spaces. For the show at this Saturdays-only gallery, audio works created at the auditorium and church are paired with videos made at the same sites. Akin to the sound recordings, the primary visual footage was projected back into the empty rooms and recorded over multiple times. In the resultant large-scale video projections, these shape-shifting venues alternately darken and become more illuminated; stairways appear or walls recede and vanish. This kind of image layering, appearing as a skewed form of time-lapse, is haunting, and it continuously transforms the viewer’s perceptions of each space. Recorded and shot in the former Soviet republic last year, Kirkegaard’s intriguing sonic-optic investigations, whether evidence of lingering radiation or an aesthetic echoing of its effects, are like radioactive decay itself: a random—but very alive—process.
