Lenin’s Lamp Glows in the Peasant’s Hut
Lina Selander
Installation. Continuous b/w HD-video (23 min), vitrine (steel, glass and wood) with 22 radiographs (90 x 500 x 36 cm) and a stainless steel text plaque (90 x 50 cm)
Sweden 2011
A central part of Lina Selander’s installation Lenin’s Lamp Glows in the Peasant’s Hut is a video, which performs a number of relays and juxtapositions among historical events and media. Included are excerpts from two films by Dziga Vertov, celebrating the electrification of Ukraine, as well as contemporary footage of the town of Pripyat, near Chernobyl, also in Ukraine, and the site of the world‘s worst nuclear accident in 1986. Film materials range from photography to film to analog and digital video. Technologies include not only cinema then, but electrical and nuclear energy too. The installation also presents a number of radiographs, traces of nuclear radiation on the stones of Chernobyl and printed on—or burned into—photographic paper.
“Henri Becquerel ‘discovered’ nuclear radiation using the technology of photography in 1896, the first year of cinema. Overcast weather forced Becquerel to postpone an attempt to trace the light emitted by a translucent substance on a photographic plate, so he packed both the substance and the plate into the same light impenetrable drawer, and afterwards found traces of radiation on the plate. Becquerel had accidentally inscribed invisible radiation. This experiment is repeated on photographic paper by Selander […]. These images are not photographs, but radiographs on photographic paper, not an inscription of flashes of light, but of waves of radiation. […] The radiographs testify not only to the history that the film exposes, but to the complex history of the “archaeology of visual inscription.” (Lundemo 2013: 20–21) (Arturo Silva)
Lina Selander, born 1973, lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden.
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Reference
Trond Lundemo, “Media Archaeology and Montage,” in Lina Selander: Echo. The montage, the fossil, the sarcophagus, the x-ray, the cloud, the sound, the feral animal, the shadow, the room, and “Lenin’s Lamp Glows in the Peasant’s Hut”, ed. Helena Holmberg (Stockholm: OEI Editör in collaboration with Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, 2013), pp. 11–25.