Maxim Dondyuk’s In the Zone of Forgetting – The Chernobyl Archive opens at Mai Manó House (Mai Manó Ház), timed to the 40th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster. Running April 1 to May 17, the exhibition delves into the Ukrainian photographer’s long-term archive, built from family photographs, letters, and negatives he salvaged from abandoned apartments inside the exclusion zone. These fragile finds become evidence and echo: lives interrupted, memories scattered, history half-erased.
Memory, Loss, and What Remains
Dondyuk’s project probes how collective memory functions when the places that held it are emptied out. The show centers on the politics and poetics of documentation: what gets preserved, who gets remembered, and how archives are built from chance survivals. By piecing together personal stories from dust and cellulose, it asks whether saving images can resist oblivion—or only map it.
Visit
Mai Manó House (Mai Manó Ház) hosts the exhibition from Wednesday, April 1, 2026, through Sunday, May 17, 2026. Cover image: Maxim Dondyuk – Mai Manó House (Mai Manó Ház).
