Contemporary Culture Centre of Barcelona exhibition review: Once upon a time Chernobyl

From El País (in full): ‘Barcelona takes a new look at Chernobyl, two decades on’ | ““Tell me about this sarcophagus’ in Chernobyl. Is it like the one in Egypt?” “No, no. In Egypt there’s a mummy inside. Here it’s just the reverse, a sarcophagus in the middle and thousands of mummies around it.”

The joke is typical of the black humor spawned by the magnitude of the 1986 nuclear catastrophe in Chernobyl, in the Ukraine, and the lack of reliable information that followed it and it can be read on a wall at the exhibition Érase una vez Chernóbil (Once upon a time Chernobyl) now on show at the Contemporary Culture Center of Barcelona (CCCB).

The exhibition includes the first photos of the accident, taken by Igor Kostin, who also closely followed the work of the “liquidators” - the name given to some 700,000 people who were mobilized after the accident to “liquidate” or clean up the catastrophe -, and the photography of Canadian Robert Polidori, who in 2001 documented the desolation of the city of Prypiat, which will continue to be contaminated and abandoned for thousands of years.

There is also political analysis of the catastrophe’s role in the fall of communism, and the present state of the extensive exclusion zone.”

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