Client: Green Network

Location: Minsk, Belarus

Completion date: 2016

Artwork budget: $2,000

Project Team

Artist

Sergei Belaoki

Client

Green Network

Overview

site-specific installation
2.5 × 2 × 1.9 m
glass tins, metal construction, LED lights, wire, lighting controller

Goals

Thirty years ago on April 26, 1986 a catastrophic nuclear accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant happened.

That was the worst nuclear power plant accident in the history.

As a result of an accident, a radioactivity discharge occurred which included isotopes of
uranium, plutonium, iodine-131.

Iodine-131 is a radioactive nuclide of iodine. In addition, it is one of the main products of
uranium and plutonium fission. It is the main contaminating radioactive component. Iodine-
131 causes mutation and death of cells it enters.

Clouds containing these radioactive materials have spread over most of Europe.

About 60% of the radioactive fall-out landed in Belarus.

Heavy, black-colored rain fell on the city of Gomel, Belarus.

The work is a visual image of the radioactive rain.

Glass tin from under the iodine solution is like a semantic equivalent of the chemical
element iodine.

131 glass tin from under the iodine solution is like as the total number of nucleons in the
core of Iodine-131.

Each tin emits weak "radioactive" glow.

Eight metal guides is the number of days of Iodine-131 half-decay.

Process

The viewer interacts with the installation, while passing through "8-day of iodine-131 half-
decay," by receiving a conditional dose of radioiodine.