The exhibition is also testimony to Ms Roche's work and that of the Chernobyl Children's Project the scale of whose involvement is unique in the region.
#Blackwind farms free
Ms Roche wants a Marshall Plan for the region, demands that others follow Ireland's example to offer free medical care to the children. And one professor estimates the eventual global death toll at close on one million. Thirteen thousand deaths among those sent in to clean up the land. Horrendous genetic defects as the children of Chernobyl now become the parents of Chernobyl. Children born with thyroid cancer - one in four have a thyroid abnormality. The statistics pour out of her: 90 per cent of the children of Belarus are affected, nine million people in the three countries, 2,000 towns and villages deserted, 400,000 evacuees, and the birth rate is down 50 per cent as women fear what birth may bring. "The next Chernobyl", she warns, "could be Chernobyl itself." And in summer the dry, contaminated earth drifts as dust on the breeze, spreading more death. The reactor is still belching radiation into the air from a sarcophagus whose gaping holes are the size of tractors and whose collapse could happen any day. If this collection succeeds in reducing to tears - and only the most hard-hearted can fail to be moved - they are of anger that man could do this to his own.įifteen years on and the disaster of Chernobyl is still happening, the indefatigable Ms Roche reminds me, as we snatch moments out of her frantic schedule in the UN canteen. Invited to the UN by the Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, funded by an enlightened grant of £43,000 by the Irish Government to mark the 15th anniversary of the reactor explosion, the exhibition is an appeal to the conscience of the world conceived by Adi Roche, the American photographer, Paul Fusco, and volunteers from Ireland's Chernobyl Children's Project.Ĭhristine Simpson, the Waterford Liverpudlian art teacher, who, over two years, pulled together the exhibition, the work of 17 artists, film-makers and photographers, says she struggled hard to avoid evoking pity and has succeeded. The black wind is Chernobyl's still blowing, still killing radiation.
Belarus, which, with the Ukraine and western Russia, bore the brunt, is "White Russia". They are among the most vivid images of an extraordinarily powerful exhibition that now occupies the foyer of the UN headquarters building on the edge of the East River in New York - "Blackwind Whiteland: living with Chernobyl". Violent contradiction is also at the heart of Susan Enticknap's child's high chair fashioned from thick, jagged thorns which suggests Christlike punishment of innocence. Death and birth are one in a strange dreamlike world. Vasili Pochitsky's black stork, wings outstretched in flight, swoops over a desolate landscape of leafless trees and small helpless childlike figures.
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