2017 – 2018
The icon corner (red corner, holy corner) is the holiest and most honorable place in a Christian Orthodox hut, house or apartment, usually placed diagonally from an old style rocket mass heater oven. It is the place where the Bible, icons, candles and so on are placed. The icon corner for the Christian Orthodox is a symbol of the spiritual, God, family altar, abundance, and wealth. My photographs picture icon corners in huts and houses of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, Ukraine, that people were forced to abandon more than 30 years ago, where religious attributes owere carefully moved by the owners or looted. But what was left instead? What is beyond crosses and crucifixes, images and icons, churches and chapels, rituals and fasting in the Christian Orthodox tradition? Only one thing – personal and intimate space of a human being, where God and Love are represented in its clearest sense.
In this project I try to show that in Slavic culture spirituality is covered by the Christian Orthodox religion and beyond it remains only the purest – Love.