Inscribing Fallout: Visualizing Casualties of the Cold War

“Maps reflect and create colorful and charged worldviews. And as the two cold warriors knew well, maps communicate volumes not just in what they include but also what they omit, in what geographer J. B. Harley called the silences.”  Excerpt from Mapping the Cold War  by Timothy Barney 

We are living in a time of unprecedented danger. The hand of the nuclear doomsday clock is now at 90 seconds to midnight, the closest to global catastrophe it has ever been. This upgraded warning by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist comes largely due to the mounting dangers from the war in Ukraine. The doomsday clock is an artifact of the Cold War era, and for many that time feels like history, yet in 2024 we are closer than ever to nuclear war and its aftermath.  For me, as a child of the late Soviet era, the looming fear of nuclear war was an ever present fear. Underground bunkers, fallout shelters, air raid drills and child sized gas masks are all part of my core memories, and now a new generation of children are faced with this trauma.   

My interest in the Cold War and its contemporary reverberations come from my personal background as a Soviet refugee of Ukrainian and Russian descent, who was primarily educated in the US. I was born in Kharkiv, Ukraine and lived there under Soviet occupation until my family was granted refugee status and immigrated to New York City, just a month prior to the fall of the Soviet Union. When we were en route to the Moscow airport to leave the only place I called home, I vividly recall seeing traces of military tanks, deeply carved repeating groves stamped into the asphalt. What I witnessed were physical traces of abstract marks made by political upheaval that ultimately toppled the USSR. The abstract patterns, groves and imprints of political unrest continue to fascinate and disrupt my sensibilities throughout my life.  

Focusing on the formal visual language of aerial defense while distilling abstract symbols as notations of cultural expression, my research and artwork considers how conflict and violence in war are aestheticized, abstracted and therefore rendered benign, yet are anything but.  I create paintings and installations that consider this acute duality within the complex history of the Cold War and the ongoing escalations between my nations of origin and citizenship. Through my art I challenge the dehumanization inherent in militaristic visualization, instead augmenting how abstraction is used to represent “casualties of war” without removing traces of  the very real implications on living beings these images represent. I co-opt this militaristic visual language by offering empathetic gestures to representations of war and destruction, marks that make these living omissions present again.