In 2000, the curator Harald Szeemann while working on an exhibition of the main project of the 49th Venice Biennale (2001) “Plateau humanity” saw the book “Viktor Marushchenko. Ukraine. Fotografien” / 1997, Benteli Verlag, Bern.
Zeeman was interested in the photos of the Ukrainian photographer about people who survived the Chernobyl disaster – the series told about the tragedy of Ukrainian people who suffered from a human-made global accident.
The curator asked Marushchenko to show all the pictures he took for the Chernobyl series.
The project preparation time was short, it would take a long time to send it by regular mail, and Victor did not use e-mail then. They decided to send images by facsimile (fax).
Marushchenko in his workshop, which was then in Kiev on the street Mala Zhitomirskaya, printed all his photos from Chernobyl series on matte bromsilver photopaper (produced by Kiev factory “Photon”) size 18×24 cm. And faxed their images to Zeeman. Curator selected 27 pictures.
For the exhibition “Plateau of humanity” in the 49th Venice Biennale the photos were specially printed.
Valeriy Miloserdov
Size: 17×23 sm, vintage, optical hand print on barite silver bromide paper
Curators: Marina Poliakova, Valeriy Miloserdov, Yuriy Marushchenko
