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Alina Rudya

Prypyat mon amour

Tschernobyl – dreißig Jahre danach

When Alina Rudya (b. Ukraine, 1985; lives and works in Berlin) was one year old, she and fifty thousand others were evacuated from the city of Prypyat after the nuclear disaster that occurred in the nearby Chernobyl power plant on April 26, 1986. Her father, an engineer, was on duty in the power station that night, when reactor no. 4 exploded during a systems test. The worst accident in the history of nuclear energy to date released an enormous highly radioactive cloud into the atmosphere, necessitating the hurried resettlement of all local residents.

After studying journalism and political science and training as a photographer at the Lette-Verein, Berlin, the Berlin University of the Arts, and the Parsons New School of Design, New York, Rudya returned to Chernobyl in 2011 and 2012 and again in 2016 for the thirtieth anniversary of the disaster.

In the photographic project “Prypyat Mon Amour,” the artist tells stories of people like herself whose lives were fundamentally changed when they had to leave Prypyat in 1986. She joined them on a tour of their former homes—a journey into their past—and compiled new as well as historic photographs to document the history of a city that has ceased to exist.