Hauntological Environmental Art: The Photographic Frame and the Nuclear Afterlife of Chernobyl in Lina Selander’s Lenin’s Lamp

Abstract

This article draws attention to how photography is changing art, by imagining a politics through which to structure a future around something other than the failed visions of technological modernization and nuclear expansion. Focusing on the ongoing environmental damage of events such as Chernobyl 32 years later, the author considers the Swedish artist Lina Selander’s ‘Lenin’s Lamp Glows in the Peasant Hut’ to examine how photography and video may work together to address the present and future force of that disaster’s ongoing environmental aftermath with history’s failed Soviet dream of progress. She proposes that ‘Lenin’s Lamp’, in its work with the temporality of material remains and impressions, is a work of hauntological environmental art that engages viewers in hope and dread. How the work stages this dual affective response through its work with the temporalities of photographic and filmic artifacts is the subject of this article.