The exhibition Infrastructure at Te Pātaka Toi Art Gallery brings together three discrete exhibitions tracing moments from the 1980s: Matthew Galloway examining the socio-political climate surrounding the Clyde Dam, a legacy of Robert Muldoon’s ‘Think Big’ initiative; Doris Lusk’s Imagined Projects series painted in 1983/4 depicting fictional industrial sites in the landscape; and Raúl Ortega Ayala’s documentation of the exclusion zone around Chernobyl—a landscape rendered uninhabitable by the nuclear power plant disaster of 1986—and the impact of this on its former residents.
Raúl Ortega Ayala’s The Zone (2013-2020) documents the legacy of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident through video, photographs and firsthand accounts of former residents of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Shot over four years, the work speaks to the repercussions of failed technological development at a monumental scale—exploring the ongoing impact on the lives of those affected, the visual impact of an abandoned city given over to nature and decay, and the lingering paraphernalia of an expired political system.
