NO (LIFE)
by Zinaida Lihacheva

Zinaida Lihacheva created (NO) LIFE! installation, reflecting on an absurdity and inevitability of death as a result of one of the most dreadful man-made disasters in human history - Chernobyl disaster. Having created a large-scale installation made of babies’ cots, using them as an irresistible metaphor that literally turns up spectators’ consciousness, as if cots had faces or individuality, the artist refers to the most ignoble side of this tragedy - coercive abortions, the scale of infant mortality concealment, inhuman and felonious totalitarian system that entered women’s destinies by force, making them destroy unborn innocent lives.

Incompetence and inhumanity of this system, absence of transparency, erroneous official data, informational vacuum turned measures called to liquidate the disaster into even bigger tragedy, taking lives of dozens of thousands of alive and unborn children, ruining destinies of hundreds of thousands of women. The system turned them into innumerable, speechless, nameless casualties of the disaster. In her work, the artist strives to rear a topic of concealed tragedy scale and bring it to public. It’s a peculiar memorial that creates a space which immerses a spectator into itself completely.

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