This lecture examines an artwork whose 2013 destruction for alleged blasphemy ignited fierce debates on censorship and freedom of speech under an emerging pro-Russian authoritarian regime in pre-war Ukraine. Shifting the conversation from iconoclasm back to the image itself, Nazar Kozak focuses on the artwork's visual references to the 1986 Chornobyl* nuclear disaster — an event that not only contaminated the Ukrainian soil with radiation but also enhanced the apocalyptic complex in the cultural psyche. He argues that the artwork resists this fatalist outlook, instead urging viewers to take responsibility for averting the world’s end and restoring the disaster-affected land into a habitable place again.

Nazar Kozak (Ph.D., Lviv Academy of Arts) is a senior researcher in the Department of Art History at the Ethnology Institute of the National Academy of Sciences, Ukraine. His scholarly interests comprise both medieval and contemporary art, which he approaches from social and eco-critical perspectives. Kozak's 2017 article on art interventions during the Ukrainian Maidan Revolution received an honorable mention as a finalist for the CAA’s Art Journal Award.

*Note: Nazar Kozak uses the spelling “Chornobyl” to reflect the Ukrainian name for the place. The more commonly used spelling, “Chernobyl,” represents the Russian pronunciation imposed by Soviet authorities on Ukraine’s toponyms in the past.
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"What presents itself everywhere as an ecological catastrophe has never stopped being, above all, the manifestation of a disastrous relationship to the world."
- The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (2007)