Alice Miceli: Projeto Chernobyl

This exhibition presents Alice Miceli’s Projeto Chernobyl (Chernobyl Project), a series of 30 radiographs produced in 2006–2010. Miceli developed a method of image making to document the enduring effects of the Soviet nuclear plant explosion of April 26, 1986. Though gamma radiation continues to be present and to cause health problems and deaths in the area, it is invisible to the naked eye and to traditional methods of photography that have been used to document the region’s ruins. With Projeto Chernobyl, Miceli made this contamination visible via direct contact between the radiation and film, which was exposed in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone for months at a time. Both technically and conceptually complex, Miceli’s work questions our ideas of vision, memory, politics, and environmental issues.

About the artist:

Born in 1980 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Alice Miceli began her education in Paris studying film at the Ecole Supérieure d’Etudes Cinématographiques. She returned to Brazil to study for her graduate degree in art and architecture at Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. In addition to her work in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, Miceli has traveled to Angola, Cambodia, Colombia, and Bosnia as a part of her research centered on photographic representation of the space of landmine fields. She has received major awards for her work, including the 2014 PIPA Prize, Rio de Janeiro and the 2015 Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation Grants & Commissions Award, Miami. She has also has held residencies at Yaddo, Bogliasco, Macdowell and Dora Maar House, among others. Her works are held in collections such as the PIPA Institute, the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro and the CIFO Collection. Projeto Chernobyl was exhibited for the first time at the 29th Biennale de São Paulo, 2010, and as an ongoing research at the transmediale festival, Berlin, editions 2007, 2008 and 2009, and the Transitio Festival, Mexico City, 2009.

Image caption: Alice Miceli, Projeto Chernobyl (Chernobyl Project), 2006–2010. Backlights, radiographic negatives. 30 parts, 11.9 x 15.8 inches (each). 29th Bienal de São Paulo, Brasil, 2010, installation view.