IN A LANDSCAPE OF (FUTURE) MEMORY

In 2012, Ursula Schulz-Dornburg travelled to north-eastern Kazakhstan to photograph the remains of the Soviet Union’s largest nuclear weapons programme. Located in a vast area south-west of the city of Kurchatov, Opytnoe Pole was once a top-secret open-air laboratory, used to measure and record the devastating effects of nuclear weapons. Taken almost twenty years after the closure of the facility, Schulz-Dornburg’s photographs portray a desolate landscape, devoid of life and still suffering the effects of radiation. The area was looted after its closure in 1991 – an act which inadvertently dispersed radioactive material across the continent – and later subject to an intensive clean-up operation by the Kazakh, Russian and US authorities. Despite this, the site appears caught in a state of suspension. Abandoned aircraft hangars and missile bunkers, once used to protect and store nuclear bombs, stand idle nearby. It is a landscape still laden with the artefacts of an architecture built to be destroyed.

With an estimated 1.5 million people thought to have been exposed to nuclear fallout from the Soviet test site alonei, the advent of nuclear weapons is one of the undisputed ruptures of the 20th century. For Ursula Schulz-Dornburg, a lifelong anti-nuclear activist, it represented a point of no return, an end in human history, and soon after visiting Kazakhstan she ceased making new photographs. After four decades of field research in remote or overlooked parts of the world, this marked the end of new photographic material entering her archive, and underscored the Cold War as one of multiple overarching narratives and timescales which come together and intersect throughout her work. This turning point in Schulz-Dornburg’s practice also prompted her to revisit and reassess her own archive of images. The present exhibition explores the idea of Schulz-Dornburg’s archive as a key element of a conceptual practice in which her images shift back and forth across time, reflecting the changing course of human history.

Born in Berlin in 1938, Schulz-Dornburg grew up in the aftermath of the Second World War – in a divided Germany and an era defined by new borders in Europe and elsewhere. Since the 1970s, she has sought out places of transit and borderlands, locations geographically and politically caught up in a state of in-between, where multiple layers of history intersect, co-exist and collide. Reflecting the lands in which she has travelled, her archive reveals a constellation which extends beyond the scope of individual images – an entanglement of narratives which overlap in time and space. In a mass of material which cannot be easily understood through a simple chronology of events, exhibitions and publications become a method for thinking through the archive, bringing together new and familiar works into new combinations and sequences.

In 2002, while on the way to photograph abandoned nuclear submarines in Murmansk in the far north-west of Russia (a project which was never realised), Schulz-Dornburg stumbled upon metal structures in the port city of Kronstadt, on the outskirts of St Petersburg. Little is known about the structures, a mystery only heightened by the artist’s decision not to disclose their purpose. In contrast to the deep historical time which so often characterises her images, the structures in Kronstadt (2002) feel temporary, as though these giant blocks have been recently abandoned or washed up onto the shore. Their presence in the exhibition invites us to imagine how Schulz-Dornburg’s photographs might one day be deciphered by future generations, as a cryptic collection of future artefacts.

Time, and the co-existence of multiple durations and temporalities – of architecture, image and history – are all important themes in Schulz-Dornburg’s practice. Her photographs, often taken in the weeks, months or years before ‘pivotal events’, now form important records of places which have since been irrevocably damaged or destroyed. Yet reading her images through the time in which they were made quickly leads us to events found outside of the frame of individual photographs. Ruptures in human history which have occurred since their making impact our collective and individual experience, altering our perceptions of the past – and consequently, our imaginings of the future. It is an approach which embraces what Shawn Michelle Smith calls the photograph’s capacity for recursivity. The photograph, Smith writes, “encapsulates a temporal oscillation, always signifying in relation to a past and a present, and anticipating a future. It refers to the moment of its making as well as the many possible moments of its viewing”.

Schulz-Dornburg anticipates and responds to the fluctuating temporalities of her images – and the vagaries and transformations of history itself – through the continual rearrangement of her archive, an integral element of her practice. But it is also a subject which she examines within her images. Her photographs of archives and museum displays echo a fascination with the way that the past is preserved, displayed, represented and reinterpreted. In the early 2000s, during a visit to Russia, she photographed various displays she encountered at state museums. After many years buried in the archive, she has chosen this moment to exhibit them – presented here in the exhibition, laid out on a table in a style akin to a museum display.

In 2000, Schulz-Dornburg visited the Russian State Museum of the Arctic and Antarctic, carrying with her a small IXUS camera. Here she encountered elaborate dioramas, carefully constructed scenes taken from the history of polar exploration. Housed inside a former church, the museum first opened during the boom in Soviet Arctic exploration in the 1930s. Like the space and arms race which followed, the polar regions were subject to fierce rivalry and competition in the rush to colonise and exploit their valuable natural resources. The USSR led the way in the development of new aircraft and icebreaker ships designed to withstand the challenging Arctic conditions. The scenes photographed by Schulz-Dornburg depict the USSR’s technological prowess through their involvement in ‘heroic’ rescue missions, feeding into a nationalistic narrative. Yet ships like the one seen in these photographs were used to transport prisoners, many of whom suffered or lost their lives in uninhabitable conditions.

Blown up and exhibited as large-format colour prints, Schulz-Dornburg’s Memoryscapes (2000) place the viewer inside a vast and hostile icy landscape. In a conversation with Julian Heynen, the artist describes how the large scale creates a sense of uncertainty, also in relation to her other images, prompting the viewer to ask whether these scenes are real or fictitiousiv. In Red Arctic, historian John McCannon identifies two simultaneous visions of the Arctic: the one of ‘blunders, crime and substandard living conditions’, hidden from public view; and a second Arctic heroic and caught up in myth, ‘a bold, larger-than-life epic’ adapted as part of the Soviet public image and ultimately inscribed into history.

In 2023, these works resonate with new meaning in the echoes and reverberations of the past as it appears in the present. Recent years have seen a return of the same hopes, ambitions and anxieties experienced in the 20th century, albeit in new forms and under new conditions. Imperial ambitions, once considered estranged enough from the present to be the subject of museum displays, punctuate the present with renewed force. In a never- ending circle of repetition, images inform our historical understanding at the same time as they are shaped by it. Reading Ursula Schulz-Dornburg’s work in the cold light of the present reveals not so much a prediction of the future but an anticipation, a speculation on factors which may (or may not) fleetingly coincide, and the need for resistance.

i https://www.nti.org/education-center/facilities/semipalatinsk-test-site/.
ii Shawn Michelle Smith, Photographic Returns: Racial Justice and the Time of Photography, Duke University Press, 2020, p. 4.
iii The Canon IXUS was a small camera originally designed for APS format (24 mm) film.
iv ‘The Verticals of Time’, excerpts from conversations between Ursula Schulz-Dornburg and Julian Heynen, December 2017 and January 2018, in: Ursula Schulz-Dornburg, The Land in Between, MACK, 2018, p. 242. v John McCannon, Red Arctic: Polar Exploration and the Myth of the North in the Soviet Union, 1932–1939, Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 59.

Text Lucy Rogers

Published on occasion of the exhibition “Memoryscapes”, Ursula Schulz-Dornburg, at Large Glass, London, from 12 May to 1 July 2023.