Uncanny parallels: Diana Thater's video installation Chernobyl at Zwirner

For her intimate explorations of endangered creatures and environments, the Californian artist Diana Thater often puts herself at risk: she has filmed gorillas in the trees of Central Africa and has stroked the face of a blind tiger.  Thater worked so closely with wolves that one alpha male chose her as his mate.

But she respects the otherness of wild animals just as much as she recognizes homo sapiens as the most fearsome predator of all. Mankind’s destructive force is the subject of her video installation “Chernobyl,” a 360-degree projection onto six walls−modeled on the ruins of the city’s movie theater−shows the devastation left by the nuclear meltdown on April 26, 1986.  Yet, while time stopped for the untold victims among the 50,000 inhabitants and for the city itself, Thater shows nature continuing, however compromised. In the absence of people, Mongolian horses roam the empty streets, cormorants nest in rusting cranes, and wolves seek shelter in deserted huts−oblivious to the invisible poison.  Scientists keep replacing the ever-decaying concrete of the "sarcophagus" meant to contain the eternally undead radiation. Thater's multilayered portrayal of this post-apocalyptic landscape teeming with doomed life was originally scheduled for next January at David Zwirner Gallery. When the art fortress of Chelsea was struck by its own catastrophe a few weeks ago, Zwirner spontaneously decided to display Thater's dystopian images at this timely moment. Visitors to his hard-hit gallery can now watch their own shadows roaming through the rubble of Chernobyl and then, just by stepping outside, contemplate anew the manifold man-made horrors inflicted on our planet.

Diana Thater © Sigrid Rothe

How did the story of exhibiting “Chernobyl” in the footsteps of Sandy transpire?

I was in the midst of editing a show that will open next week in LA when three Zwirner employees called me from a car at a MacDonald's parking lot, the only place where one of their cell phones worked after the storm. They explained that David wanted to reopen the gallery really soon, that everybody was hungry to see art - and that I needed to ship the material the next day. It was the first time in my life that I thought my gallery needs me. There has been all this schadenfreude around David as a powerful dealer affected badly by the hurricane. I would have gone right away to help, but I had to vote, so I went on a plane right afterwards. Originally I wanted to present the installation in the wreckage, but the gallery preferred it to be shown as intended: in a hexagonal space like the Chernobyl movie theater, which they built in two days. I think the work is really resonant right now.

Pairing Chernobyl and Sandy would stress the human impact of the latter?

My work has an ethical position, which is about the destructive relationship between human beings and nature. Chernobyl is the most obvious case, and this hurricane is a less direct, but incredibly destructive variation caused by climate change - that's a fact, and there aren't two sides to facts, even though it’s presented that way in the United States.

As if that was democracy. Both disasters were the result of failed politics.

In Chernobyl you have the failure of science and the simultaneous failure of a political system - Chernobyl is one of the major instances that brought Perestroika about, because the Soviet Union could not afford to clean it up, so instead the most eradiated peasant villages were simply bulldozed and buried in a huge hole. There is also a truck graveyard, and a helicopter graveyard.

Cleaning-up in most of Chelsea's galleries © Sigrid Rothe

But you show a place that seems full of animal and plant life.

The scientists who work in the so-called exclusion zone and study the animals asked me very adamantly not to make it look as if life was thriving there, which is the myth put out by the Ukrainian government. But there is this amazing forest ranger, Wassily, who tries to protect these severely endangered Mongolian horses. He has this huge piece of land that is totally outside the law, it is patrolled by the Ukrainian secret police and by the army. He is even trying to bring Grizzly bears from the US. He reasons that these animals are going to be extinct anyway. If there were other places for them, they would live there.

We have really upended Darwinism: it's no longer the survival of the fittest but of those most removed from human beings, like in Chernobyl or the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea.

Tigers will be extinct within our life time, there are less than 5,000 of them left in the wild. When I observe them in my work it is with the hope that it will be seen a hundred years from now.

© Sigrid Rothe

Like the early 20th-century explorers who brought back specimens from Africa for the museums of natural history, knowing already then that these species would eventually all disappear−but you're not killing them in order to preserve them.

Jacques Derrida said that in order to understand something you can either use vivisection−meaning you can kill it, cut it up−or you can build a model of it, and that is my idea: to build a model of observation and to communicate to the viewer that an animal is a subject and not an object for your possession or to have spiritual communication with.

Your art is a tool against anthropomorphism.

I fight the illusion that animals live by the same rules, and I want to talk about the alternative to anthropomorphism, which is observation and comprehension, not this sort of emotive approach, because animals are not emotive towards human beings−they want to be left alone. The only thing you can do is watch and try to understand how other beings live in the world. Thinking through looking, that is what art is.

© Sigrid Rothe