«When from destruction the currents of new forces are created...»

The project ‘When from destruction the currents of new forces are created...’ dedicated to the 60th anniversary of atomic power is a continuation of MAMM’s collaboration with the Rosenergoatom Concern, initiated in 2012 by the exhibition ‘Atomic Civilisation’. The first atomic power station worldwide was connected to external grids and launched in the USSR on 27 June 1954. This event marked the dawn of a new era in global power engineering.

The drama of the exhibition is generated according to the principle of concentric circles — from physical processes occurring at an atomic level, through an artistic conceptualisation of the industrial architecture surrounding these processes, to a reportage sketch on the functioning of an atomic power station and the people who work there.

The exhibition is based on works by two photographers — Evgeny Fadin and Zhenya Mironov.

Veteran of atomic power engineering Evgeny Fadin is a Rosenergoatom Concern photographer who has worked at the Kalinin Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) since 1980. Over the years he has produced a veritable photo chronicle charting the development of the power station — from All-Union construction by shock-workers to the present day — and recorded the most important stages in its existence, in particular the installation and launch of all four power-generating units. As well as works dedicated to the Kalinin NPP, the display includes Fadin’s photographs taken at the Beloyarsk and Leningrad NPPs in 2014. These have never previously been published or exhibited.

Zhenya Mironov is a young but already noted photographer, a participant in the Photobiennale 2014 and nominee for this year’s Kandinsky Prize. He presents two series of works at the exhibition, special created for this project. His creative method departs from the idea that photography, like cinema, has drama and direction. In his visual productions Mironov tries to organise the conflict that emerges at the juncture between images. For this he uses Kuleshov’s montage theory, by which the juxtaposition of contiguous frames in the montage sequence not only creates a combined content, but even alters our perception of one frame depending on the content of another. Mironov’s series ‘Metaphors of Atomic Surroundings’ is actually built on this principle and proposes an artistic analysis of industrial architecture: the author finds subtle formal rhythms between the architecture of atomic power stations and forms from the world of nature. Mironov’s second series ‘Nature of the Atom’ was prepared in collaboration with scientists, specialists at the Rosenergoatom Concern. This is a dialogue between artist and scientist on how to present highly complex physical processes invisible to the naked eye in the language of images that are familiar to us all. ‘It’s hard to imagine what the process inside an atomic reactor really looks like,’ says the photographer. ‘But we can depict these complicated hidden processes through our own experience, through a visualisation of nature.’

In conclusion, a special section of the exhibition features images by participants in an open photo competition held by the Rosenergoatom Concern in cities housing its major facilities. The competition had five categories (‘The atom — my life’, ‘People of action’, ‘My region’, ‘Our future’ and ‘City life’), and the best of the three thousand photographs submitted are included in this exhibit.