[Interview] Stanislava Pinchuk, aka Miso, Maps the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster with Thousands of Tiny Pinholes

Stanislava Pinchuk, aka miso, has tattooed Florence Welch and customised jackets for Cara Delevigne. In preparation for her new show Fall Out, she’s been spending twelve hours a day putting pinholes into paper. The process requires a radical form of patience.

Currently showing at Adelaide’s Hugo Michell Gallery, Fall Out is inspired by Pinchuk’s research in Fukushima following the 2011 nuclear disaster. Delicately placed pinholes hammered into white watercolour paper trace the topographies of sites within the nuclear exclusion zone. In every tiny pinhole, the viewer is reminded of someone’s loss of land and home.

Pinchuk’s body of work, with its sense of duty and precision, acts as both a record and a piece of tender resistance. The Creators Project caught up with the Ukrainian-born artist to learn more.

The Creators Project: Can you tell us about the motivations behind Fall Out?

Stanislava Pinchuk: The last body of work I made [Surface to Air] mapped the civil war in Ukraine, and it finally cemented that I want to be a landscape artist. I think it also cemented my resolve to work in conflict zones. I lived in Tokyo for so long, so it [Fukushima] was a very vivid and real reality. I guess also being born in Ukraine two years after Chernobyl means you have a very different understanding of nuclear disaster.

The chance to visit Fukushima kind of happened by accident, straight after I opened Surface to Air. But it was something that I jumped at the chance to see. It’s a stepping stone to complete a trilogy of work about the conflict zones within places that I’ve lived.

Is your work influenced by Taryn Simon? You both seem to have this incredible dedication to research, without being didactic.

That’s so interesting. You’re right, but I never ever thought of that. I love her because I think she’s such a good communicator, and an educator but not in an obvious way. I love how she deals with data and information in a really logical way. Without being too editorialised, it’s incredibly emotive.

I’ve been thinking a lot about art as communication. I’ve been really at odds with the art world lately, and I’ve been really at odds with art writing, in a massive, massive way. I think it seems so unnecessarily obtuse, so often. There’s something about people that can communicate with the most bare bones words. I think that’s what I’ve been trying to do.

There’s a part of my brain that’s really mathematic. The part of my brain that likes working with data is something I fought against for ages because I didn’t think it was something that artists should be. It’s not a way you feel like your brain should work. But when I finally embraced it, I think I started making the first work that truly felt like mine.

Can you tell us about your process?

I think I took about 15 photos during my time in Fukushima because I was just so careful not to remove myself from what I was seeing or what I was trying to understand. For weeks afterwards, I dreamt about it, and I thought about it for a long time. Now, in retrospect, I wish I’d shot a lot of particular things or that I’d recorded them. I didn’t know what I wanted to make for a little while, either. So, that’s the way I started approaching working in conflict zones: trying not to have any expectations, or clear shapes, or imagery. Trying not to look for anything.

As I’m just starting to work with conflict zones, I feel like I’m only qualified to work with places that have been home to me, until I have the skills that I need. The ethical structures and visual language to know that I can do the situations justice. I think that when your home is invaded and there is war in your country…you can’t help but to make work about it.

In the words of Hans Ulrich Obrist, recording is a protest against forgetting. Does this sentiment inform your work?

I’m not interested in any aesthetics of war or military might or political agenda. What I feel like I can talk about is the personal feeling of experiencing that as a kind of powerless civilian not knowing what ground you’re standing on, feeling really powerless and at odds with these greater forces around you. In that way, it’s the protest that I feel like I’m qualified to make.

There’s a history of women [protesting] through textiles in conflict zones, like Kanga fabrics in Africa and Afghan war rugs. They look really delicate and subtle and slight. These traditions of what I think is considered women’s work—lace making,embroidery, couture—are so physically painful and laborious and sweaty and completely hideous, yet often dismissed as simply decorative. I actually think it’s an incredible visual language that is so full of tension and pain…a denial of the aesthetic that we normally put on to war and conflict.

That pain is a huge part of the meaning of this work. Because it’s something that destroys me to make.

Stanislava Pinchuk's Fall Out continues at Adelaide's Hugo Michell Gallery until July 23. You can find out more about it here.

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