Yana Kononova

I started working on the Radiations of War series in March 2022. Since then, I’ve been staying in areas that were occupied by Russian troops, or territories where hostilities have occurred. I also travel to places that have experienced the terror of Russian missile campaigns. In these places, I take pictures on my medium format camera of war crimes, destroyed civilian infrastructure, the activities of various Ukrainian services, the bodies of fallen warriors and victims among the civilian population.

I didn't have any experience of being a war correspondent before the invasion, so these trips became an intimate encounter face-to-face with pain. It was as if the war had perforated holes in the Earth, through which pain was inflicted in an endless stream – blending planetary and human aspects of existence, and forming an unbreakable bond between the living and those who died terrible, unjust deaths. The term ‘radiation’ alludes to that composite, to the polluted nature of the experience of war, to the fact that in its perception there is always something beyond visual information – some kind of hum, some kind of trembling – that changes our sense of space. It passes through memory, through the body, beyond the body, through generations.

My artistic approach sits between impartial observation – of bearing witness and documenting – and of  capturing some more symbolic gestures that foreground the existential dimensions of technical warfare, violence and genocide. These images speak to the consequences of trauma for human existence, as well as to our wider planet.

I went to the Irdynsky peat swamp forest for the first time in late 2019, having begged my friend Zakhar to be my guide. For him these solitary places are sacred; he didn’t want to draw too much attention to them. The Irdynsky bog occupies the old river bed of the Dnieper, which has separated from its modern floodplain. Considered an unproductive hindrance, swamp forests offer little economic value, and are therefore one of the most threatened, least studied and most poorly understood biotypes. The Irdynsky bog was itself cleared and drained multiple times: first during the Russian Empire; then under the reign of a landowner to expand hunting territory; and again for Soviet-era peat mining.

My expeditions mainly relate to the southern part of the swamp, which was the first to suffer from peat mining. Perhaps the distinctive exoticism of these forests – their weirdness – comes from their double-natured character. The swamp exhibits the repetitive patterns of a seemingly artificial origin, but at the same time, this organised chaos of spongy labyrinths is completely inhuman. A deep understanding has emerged of how the embodied experience of travelling through a marsh can destroy all the cultural clichés, superstitions and myths that surround it. To paraphrase the anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, the swamp shows us an image of ourselves in which we do not recognise ourselves.