Nicky Larkin

b. 1983, IrelandI am primarily a video and sound-installation artist, and I also make experimental films. My work is concerned with empty spaces and bleak environments, where aesthetic value is not viewed as important or enforced. A nomadic existence is at the centre of my practice. I travel around in search of these new aesthetic environments, often empty places, deserted by people for some reason, temporarily or permanently.

My film and video works are comprised of extremely long takes, unedited footage transcribing real time. By using long takes and few cuts, I aim to give the viewers a sense of time passing, time lost, and the relationship of one moment in time to another. I spend a long time setting up each shot, and then once I am happy I simply let the camera roll.

The city of Pripyat was once considered the finest place to live in the whole of the Soviet Union. A thoroughly modern city, it was built in 1970 to house the workers of the new Chernobyl nuclear power plant and their families, and was once home to 50,000 people. In the aftermath of the accident in April 1986, the residents were instructed to pack just one suitcase and told they would be returning in three days. A thousand buses were drafted in from all across the Soviet Union to take the residents of Pripyat out of their now highly contaminated home. They never returned. Twenty-one years later, Pripyat stands empty, a ghost town deep within the exclusion zone, the last remaining Soviet city. This experimental film takes us inside Pripyat to examine the relationship between time, nature and culture in a city that will never be lived in again.

(Text: reading the city catalogue, 2009)