Three painted placards appropriate postcards of Soviet Republic national costume patterns from 1958, removing idealised images of industry and replacing them with images of a nuclear power station from each country: Ukraine, Lithuania and Belarus. The placards reveal the material realities behind the romanticised representations of national traditions, and simultaneously place the power stations in the historical context of the Soviet Union.

The placards each appropriate an illustrated postcard by I. Shimanskayafrom a series called "A Friendly Family of the Peoples of the USSR", printed in Kalinin City (now Tver) in 1958 in an edition of 125,000. By montaging images from the costume patterns in juxtaposition with images of the nuclear power plants, the three works seek to place nuclear power in the context of the Soviet culture that produced them.

By introducing nuclear imagery into a visual context where industrial development is celebrated as an emblem of supra-national progress, the paintings might offer the possibility of a hopeful reading of the promise of nuclear energy. However, the inclusion of imagery from Chernobyl and the fact that the painted images have been made into placards also enables them to be read as signifiers of protest against the values that produced both the nuclear power plants and nuclear state itself. Nuclear power has not gone away. Even after the Chernobyl disaster and the closing of the Lithuanian nuclear power plant at Ignalina, the Belarus state has built a new nuclear power plant close to the Lithuanian border at Astravets.

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/29255