Photo: Priozersk XIV (I Was Told She Once Held An Oar), Kazakhstan 2011.
The border between Kazakhstan and Russia is 4,254 miles long. It assumed its current shape in 1930, and became an international border in 1991, when the Soviet Union dissolved. Along this border were closed cities—restricted military zones—that had been concealed from the public at large. These cities, Priozersk (formally known as ‘Moscow 10’) and Kurchatov (“The Polyglon”), did not appear on any maps until “discovered” by Google Earth.
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During the Cold War, these cities became the sites for covert testing of nuclear weapons and long distance weapons. Kurchatov was the site of more than 400 tests. The government claimed it was uninhabited, but that was a cover story. Locals played a vital role in the project, as scientists silently documented the effects of radiation and pollution on them and their livestock. Not surprisingly, Kurchatov has the highest incidence of cancer anywhere in the world.
The Aral Sea I (Officers Housing), Kazakhstan 2011
Both cities were demolished to preserve their secrets, leaving in their place a fierce and lonesome landscape consisting of ruinous architecture and desolate scenes. The ruins stand as monuments of the part, of the Cold War’s nihilistic race to destroy the earth. Fascinated by the area’s past and driven by discovery, photographer Nadav Kander (b. 1961, Israel) was compelled to create a series of work rooted in “the aesthetics of destruction” currently on view in Nadav Kander: Dust at Flowers Gallery, New York, now through May 7, 2016.
The work is a silent testament to a hidden Holocaust, a genocidal regime waged at the hands of a government against its own people. Little is known of what those scientists discovered in their work, the devastation that befell a people doomed for living in their homeland. Kander describes what he saw as “empty landscapes of invisible dangers,” provoking our imagination to all that has been erased, vanished without a trace.
Priozersk II, (Tulip in Bloom), Kazakhstan 2011
Kander does not see himself as a documentarian; instead he transforms the remnants of death and destruction into an intensely moving experience. We are left to ponder what was, knowing full well of the impossibility of this. Truth, just like justice, must be served in another form. Dust reminds us of this: of the importance of exposing the lies and speaking honoring the dead. Kander’s photographs are quiet and mournful, yet a melody pervades, a hymn to that speaks to tragedy, trauma, and brutality that lies deep within. Dust is equal parts eulogy and memorial; it is a wordless epitaph to the buried secrets of the earth.
All photos: © Nadav Kander. Courtesy Flowers Gallery.
Miss Rosen is a New York-based writer, curator, and brand strategist. There is nothing she adores so much as photography and books. A small part of her wishes she had a proper library, like in the game of Clue. Then she could blaze and write soliloquies to her in and out of print loves.
