Playtime in the Exclusion Zone

Misha Ilin’s exhibition Pale Grass Blue at Hamiltonian Artists in Washington, DC, is an installation of interrelated works that radiate outwards from the back of the gallery. There, the viewer is greeted by lead pig (one day this sadness will fossilize) (2024), a floor-to-ceiling assemblage. A pig-shaped cookie jar containing a chunk of uranium ore sits on a warped foil square, an ashen disco ball suspended from above. The lid is slid open slightly, and a microphone on a boom stand pointing into the crack gives the impression that the little gray pig, bathed in a bluish spotlight, is performing—the uncanny tick-tick-tick of a Geiger counter is its eerie, repetitive refrain. 

Like the uranium’s half-life, the show’s artworks seem to fall off from this sculptural hyperobject. In hello red forest, hello soil (2024), Ilin has assembled plastic toy soldiers in piles of sand nearby. They embody the Russian soldiers who dug themselves into trenches in the exclusion zone near Chernobyl during the invasion of Ukraine. Perhaps the latent toxicity of the ground was a more certain threat to the soldiers than the Ukrainian resistance, but time will tell. It is said that another 10,000 years will pass before Chernobyl is safe enough for human habitation. It is said that the green tree frogs there have changed color but still survive. How habitable is this gallery, uranium chattering away from inside the pig’s belly? According to the artist, the fall-off zone measures a few inches. But it doesn’t feel safe, even looking from a distance. The disfigured soldiers’ melted, colorless, and congealed bodies signal an inexorable, inevitable decay. 

Ilin was born in Russia in 1985, a year before the meltdown of the reactors at Chernobyl. The worst nuclear disaster in human history, then, could be seen as the artist’s political primal scene. He was born into a historical inflection point of human-made ecocide and grew up alongside the resulting mutations, organic and social. The artist seems to feel a kinship with the genetically altered; the pale grass blue butterfly, referred to in the exhibition’s title, was mutated due to the radiation at Fukushima. Low, bluish light illuminating the exhibition references both the color of these mutant insects and the altering power of radioactive materials. On several assemblages and paintings, made of plaster sprayed with silvery chrome paint, seemingly coated with ash, Ilin places replicas of these butterflies; prefabricated, ordered from Amazon. In the haunting scene of vanitas (table series) (2024), what looks like a deserted dinner table serves as a landing pad for these post-apocalyptic creatures. Eerily still and frozen in time, what could be a sign of life’s persistence in the wake of destruction becomes an inert specimen, stultified in media res on a tableau mort. 

Throughout the exhibition, didactics offer instructions. To the right of (epigraph instruction or how to view unshielded radioactive specimen in the gallery) (2024), an embedded text reads:

Ilin’s previous projects have often played with the ludic overlap between the rules of games and the regulations of institutions. In this exhibition, the instructions offer cold comfort, exemplifying the distancing of bureaucratic language in the face of imminent danger. Still, there is something playful at play. Wall pieces like the room (2023) offer an interface through which to view a ruined horizon, a fossilization of the screen view of military drone operators, and, in turn, their simulacra in first-person video games.

I am reminded of how often young boys (in particular, though not exclusively) are trained to think of themselves as potential combatants through action figures. In the US, we had GI Joe. I am reminded of the way that I, as a kid growing up in 1980s California, was made aware of the nuclear threat as a science-fictionalized doomsday scenario through anti-Soviet propaganda like the campy 1983 film The Day After, in video games like Missile Command (1980), and post-perestroika superhero stories from Marvel Comics’ 2099 series. Allow me to digress:

Chernobyl is factual—what happened there, real, yet the mythologies around radioactive super-powers (whether superheroes or nation-states) are just that: politicized fabrications anthropomorphizing power struggles in a no-win situation, the effects of which are felt by humans, animals, even the inanimate. Back to Ilin’s toy soldiers, then. The half-buried figures in Ilin’s sandbox look like the relics of a kid’s afternoon after a bomb went off.  Ilin’s work echoes these speculative fantasies while confronting the viewer with warfare’s high stakes and lived consequences, its toxic aura eating away at us even from a distance. Pale Grass Blue renders The Cold War Spider-Man 2099 figured a curiosity of the past as a kind of cultural exclusion zone that persists in the everyday, our lives and our deaths.

In one of the exhibition’s most emotionally engaging and challenging pieces, the artist asks us not to speculate but to witness. Hanging in strips from the ceiling, casting blue-tinted shadows from the wall, the text-piece (caring instruction or how to handle a radioactive event when the state decided to lie about it) (2024) reveals witness accounts of the events of the Russia-Ukraine war.

The plaster-coated, bandage-like scrolls at once recall casts for broken limbs and the endless scroll of a social media thread. A fragment of one reads,

As Ilin notes in his description of the work, “These stories were collected by a friend who joined a network of volunteers and hosted many refugee families transiting through Russia to Europe in their apartment in Saint Petersburg.” As such, these accounts radiate through the social body of a contemporary society that looks away from war, but nonetheless, is dying from its effects.

Alexandro Segade is an interdisciplinary artist whose queer world-building projects propose speculative group identities.

1. Excerpts from a story called “Deep Cover,” written by Ian Edginton, art by Malcolm Davis (pencils), Chris Ivy (inks), Jon Babcock (letters), Tom Smith (colors), published by Marvel Comics in Spider-Man 2099 Annual #1 (July 1994).. ↩︎