Yana Kononova, Radiations of War, 2025

War does not end when the sound of explosions fades away. It persists, saturating the territory, taking root in the silence of devastated landscapes. Radiations of War traces this persistence, not as documentation, but as an encounter with a territory where disaster does not end with the impact, but continues to develop, transforming the earth into a witness and archive.

What emerges when the front line retreats? Ruins are not inert remains, but landscapes in transformation, laden with what has passed through them. These images are not mere documents, but testimonies to how war creeps into the topography, how violence settles into the earth and lingers in the weight of absence.

The term radiation evokes the composite and polluted nature of the experience of war. It suggests more than what the eye perceives – a buzzing, a tremor – that alters our sense of space. It moves through memory, through the body, beyond the body, through generations.

Here, war is neither an event nor a single catastrophe, but an endless process, radiating outwards, spreading through the earth, engraving itself long after the moment of violence.