Hana Vojáková

Posted by Fabio 3 March 2010

For her first solo exhibition in the UK, London based, Czech artist Hana Vojáková will present Red Balloon 86, an evocative exhibition comprising a series of largeformat photographs and a five-screen video installation, which offer a personal response to the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. In Winter 2009, Vojáková gained extremely rare access to the Chernobyl exclusion zone, one of only a handful of people able to enter and document the startling location.

The inspiration for this body of work came when the artist watched documentary footage from an archive of a former CCCP television channel, which showed a young boy chasing a football in Pripyat, a town two miles outside Chernobyl. The footage was recorded just hours before the Chernobyl explosion, which subsequently shrouded the area with life-threatening levels of radioactivity, leaving Pripyat uninhabitable.

Ever since the radioactive explosion, Chernobyl has remained as it was left 24 years ago.
Through her haunting photographs of the city in its present-day condition, Vojáková reveals a place that is frozen in time and history, steeped in the memory of the disaster. Throughout this exhibition, the artist also explores notions of personal versus public memory. On visiting Chernobyl, Vojáková, who was raised in communist Czechoslovakia in the 1980s, came across remnants of the lives of the towns inhabitants, such as furniture, fabrics and toys. These paraphernalia struck a personal chord with the artist, as they were similar to those from her own childhood.
Thus not only do these works explore the memory of the documented events of Chernobyl, but also invite the viewer to remember their own past, and encourages the viewer to identify with those affected by the disaster.

Superimposed onto each image, and into the derelict locations, is a haunting figure of a young child holding a red balloon, representing the memory of the life that once occupied these spaces. This is reminiscent of the original documentary footage of the child shown chasing a football, and also references the little boy following a heliumfilled balloon in Albert Lamorisse’s classic short film The Red Balloon (1956), designed to reconcile a Western European audience with the Eastern European motif. By heavily manipulating her photographs in this way, Vojáková also plays with the idea that history, memory, and the reproduced image, are “truthful”, and reminds us to question the information that is presented to us.
The accompanying video installation bring the photographs to life by deploying five computer screens across which the viewer traces the path of the child who continues to follow the red balloon in a continuous loop. For the child in this video, there is no future or destination, just an endless journey.

The Red Balloon (Le Ballon Rouge) is a 1956 fantasy short film directed by the French filmmaker Albert Lamorisse. Filmed in Paris, the thirty-four minute short follows the adventures of a young boy who one day finds a conscious, mute, red balloon. The films also acts as a record of the Belleville area of Paris, which was destroyed during the late 1960s, and was left untouched for the following 20 years. Nearly all landmarks preserved in this film no longer exist. The film won numerous awards, including an Oscar for Lamorisse for best original screenplay, and the Palme d’Or for short films at Cannes.

Exhibition opens to the public at 12pm on Friday 12th March
11 Mansfield Street, London W1G 9NZ
Opening Times
Monday: CLOSED
Tuesday – Friday: 12pm-6pm,
Saturday – Sunday: 12pm-7pm