Radiations of War / Yana Kononova

For Yana Kononova, war does not end when the sound of explosions fades. It lingers, saturating the land and settling into the silence of devastated landscapes. The project Radiations of War traces this persistent presence in Ukraine – not as a documentary record, but as an encounter with a terrain where disaster continues after its impact. The land becomes both witness and archive. When the front line retreats, the ruins left behind reflect a changing landscape, laden with everything that has passed through it. Kononova’s images are evidence of this process. They show how violence nestles in the earth and how the weight of the absence of previous violence continues to work.

For the artist, the term 'radiation' evokes the complex, polluted nature of the experience of war. It evokes more than what meets the eye. There is a hum or tremor that alters our sense of space. This feeling moves through memory and the body. It goes beyond the body, through generations. War here is not an event or a one-time disaster. It is an endless process, radiating outwards and rippling across the land.

Yana Kononova began working on the Radiations of War series in March 2022. Since then, she has been living and working in areas previously occupied by Russian troops, areas affected by active fighting, or locations that have suffered the terror of rocket attacks. Using a medium-format camera, Kononova documents war crimes. She documents the destroyed civilian infrastructure, the efforts of Ukrainian emergency services, and the bodies of fallen soldiers and civilians.

Both the exhibition and the book combine Kononova’s images with poetry by Joyelle McSweeney. The book is published by FOTODOK and XYZ Books and part of the Creative Europe initiative Intergalactica : Books for Culture Without Borders .