OPENING: Radiations of War, by Yana Kononova

SCHEDULE
17:00 doors open
18:30 talk and Q&A
20:00 closing
FOTODOK is proud to announce Yana Kononova‘s solo exhibition Radiations of War. In Kononova’s terms, war does not end when the noise of explosions fades. It lingers, saturating the land and embedding itself in the silence of devastated landscapes.
The Radiations of War project traces this persistence through Ukraine—not as a documentary record, but as an encounter with a terrain where disaster continues after impact, turning the land into both witness and archive. When the frontline recedes, the ruins left behind reflect a landscape in transformation, charged with that which has passed through it. Kononova’s images are evidence of this process, revealing how violence settles into the earth—lingering in the weight of absence. For the artist, the term ‘radiations’ evokes the composite, polluted nature of how war is experienced. It evokes more than the eye perceives: a hum or a tremor that alters our sense of space, that moves through memory, through the body, beyond the body, across generations. Here, war is neither an event nor a singular catastrophe but a process without end, radiating outward and rippling across the land.
Yana began working on the Radiations of War series in March 2022. She has since stayed and worked in areas formerly occupied by Russian troops, territories affected by active combat or locations that have endured the terror of missile strikes. Employing a medium format camera, Kononova’s work documents war crimes, destroyed civilian infrastructure, the efforts of Ukrainian emergency services, and the bodies of both fallen soldiers and civilian victims.
The exhibition opening marks the launch of the artist’s first photobook, co-published by FOTODOK and XYZ Books. Pairing Kononova’s photographs with poetry by Joyelle McSweeney, both the exhibition and the Radiations of War publication have been developed as part of the Creative Europe initiative Intergalactica: Books for Culture Without Borders.
This is the second collaborative exhibition by FOTODOK Utrecht and WORM Rotterdam, after the exhibition with Palestinian Photographer and Photo journalist Wahaj Bani Moufleh (ALL EYES…, June 2024). The audience gets a glimpse of the artists’ lived experiences. Together we present powerful stories through a lens of humanity, creating a space for conversation.