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This chapter by curator Dr Ele Carpenter (UK/Sweden) is written in collaboration with visual artists Lise Autogena (Denmark/UK), Gabriella Hirst (Australia/Germany) Warren Harper (UK/Canada), Alex Ressel and Kerri Meehan (UK/Australia) and the late Nangarridj Jeremiah Garlngarr (Jawoyn Country/Australia) to investigate how socially and culturally embedded art practices can bring new knowledge to the discourses of nuclearity and decolonization. 

The chapter draws on Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang's ethic of incommensurability as a productive framework for rethinking the role and agency of art in nuclear sites and communities. Carpenter applies Tuck and Yang's argument that decolonisation is not a metaphor, to the context of radioactive contamination, where both are incommensurable. She argues that de-contamination, like de-colonisation, like is not a simple point of closure, but rather a process of response-ability. In this sense the nuclear cannot be metaphorically decolonised to produce a clean future.

The artworks demonstrate that the nuclear has always been a form of colonisation of lands and bodies through uranium mining, weapons testing, and contamination. Drawing on nuclear colonial relationships between Denmark and Greenland (Autogena), Britain and Australia (Hirst & Harper, Ressel & Meehan), the art projects trace changing perspectives on uranium and nuclear materials across continents and hemispheres. Through collaborative and distributed artworks the artists examine different approaches to responsibility for land and country, generations past, present and future. The projects address nuclear geopolitics and deep time storytelling through indepth artistic research with specific communities and contexts. Their works create forms of colonial acknowledgement, moving between territories and cultures, to rethink the language of nuclear modernity.

Curator Ele Carpenter and artists Alex Ressel and Kerri Meehan collaborated with the late Nangarridj Jeremiah Garlngarr to publish one of his paintings of the Bula Djang Coronation Hill/Guratba Earthquake dreaming as the key figure for this chapter. The painting is vital to 60,000 years of Indigenous intergenerational transfer of knowledge about how to behave with care and respect in an area now known to be rich in uranium. 

To try and situate the relationship to country in an older European relationship to land, Carpenter critically reflects on the concepts of the commons and undercommons. She argues that the acknowledgement of nuclear incommensurability helps to open up space for solidarity and allyship, a space which might be described as a nuclear undercommons. This discussion raises many unresolved questions about artistic nuclear decolonial discourse, which continue to be investigated through the field work, artistic and curatorial practices of the Nuclear Culture Research Group. 

Nuclear legacies can last for millions of years, and artists will continue to investigate them within the contemporary conditions of our time. In the twenty first century Kota Takeuchi is interested in how we physically view and perform images of nuclear events and their memory. His practice investigates relationships between media and social memory by revisiting historical monuments and creating media archaeologies of nuclear industrial legacies. He also has a powerful ability to collapse the visual and emotional distance between the viewer and the subject, perhaps because he has chosen to live in the context of his work, to be located and engaged in the complex social, economic and aesthetic processes of the post-Fukushima event. Takeuchi’s embedded artworks draw us closer to the contaminated site of the dilapidated Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power plant, and trace connections with nuclear sites across the planet. 

This paper aims to identify a number of challenges arising from the separation of artistic and scientific research, and how they are being addressed through the establishment of the new UmArts research centre. Through a discussion of research principles and questions, the paper will start to articulate the value of interdisciplinary research practices where artists and curators have the freedom to develop all kinds of knowledge and disseminate it in many different forms. This debate has many synergies with decolonial discourse in challenging the empirical traditions of science, opening up space for new kinds of knowledge and new (or very old) ways of knowing. 

UmArts takes an interdisciplinary approach both between the arts subjects, and between arts and humanities/sciences which embraces all the different artistic and scientific research criteria with the arts subjects. Whilst the definitions of art and science may seem somewhat arbitrary semantics for most hybrid researchers, their differences are constantly instituted within university and state research funding bureaucracies. With each bureaucratic inscription the characteristics of artistic research are in danger of being narrowed by trying to defend itself against the academization of its subject. 

Whilst many artists will be glad to know that their subject is receiving due care and attention, the separation of art and science produces many semantic, intellectual and discursive problems. There is a danger that separating out art as an exception, can create a research hierarchy with art as a second tier within the academy, reducing its intellectual capacity and agency. A more relaxed and flexible approach is needed to develop a rigorous culture of arts research which can operate in hundreds of different ways. There are as many artistic research methods as there are artists, and not every artwork is a doctorate in itself, so a clear set of research principles are needed as a basic rubric for evaluation. Fortunately these already exist within the wider discourses and practices of research. 

The Nuclear Culture project of Ele Carpenter is the overarching title for her curatorial research into art and nuclear culture covering the full material trace of radioactive materials from uranium mining, energy and weapons production, decommissioning and waste. The curatorial process involves working closely with artists and a range of nuclear contexts, carrying out field research, commissioning new artworks, curating exhibitions and hosting roundtable discussions and symposia. The project started in 2011 when Carpenter was invited to talk about how artists might respond to submarine dismantling by the Submarine Dismantling Project Advisory Group (SDPAG) who were advising the British Ministry of Defence on how to take apart and store their old laid up nuclear submarines, some of which still have their old reactors on board. This article is a conversation between Maarten Vanden Eynde and Ele Carpenter about the urgency of nuclear visibility and deep time responsibility of radioactive waste in a period of increasing insurmountability.

Eglė Rindzevičiūtė talks to Ele Carpenter about the strong correlation between the experience of imperialism and colonial power, high technology and cultural responsibility.

There are two nuclear power plants in the vicinity of Vilnius: Ignalina (decommissioned) and Astravets (not yet operational). A third, and infamous other, is Chernobyl, eerily present following the effects of its catastrophic failure, and more recently via the popular television series that focuses on the disastrous consequences of lies and neglect. The exhibition Splitting the Atom offers insight into the different cultural contexts of these plants and their role in the global infrastructure of the nuclear cycle – from natural resource extraction to waste.

Nuclear technology was integral to the aesthetics of the Cold War; the scale and terror of the atomic bomb shaped a hypnotic image of a nuclear sublime where modern science and technology were perceived as omnipotent. By the beginning of the new millennium, evidence of everyday experience of radioactive contamination through nuclear testing, uranium mining, and colonial exploitation combined with the dangers of radioactive waste was better understood and radically influenced how artists consider nuclear aesthetics.

Walking around the perimeter of the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) at Aldermaston, England, along with a group of artists and researchers—we peer through the fence, at industrial facilities shielding the construction of nuclear weapons. From this site, just an hour's drive from London, weapons are transported by road to Her Majesty's Naval Base on the Clyde, in Scotland, where they function as Britain's Trident nuclear 'deterrent'. Time is confused, here, oscillating between the Cold War, the banal reality of the nuclear economy, and a potentially apocalyptic future.

There's nothing romantically sublime about hanging around in the wet English countryside with a radiation monitor. This is a suburban landscape. Yet, behind the fence, plutonium is being milled into components for warheads capable of realizing even greater megatons of nuclear spectacle than demonstrated in the mid-twentieth century, at the Marshall Islands, and Semipalatinsk. The women at the Peace Camp explain that AWE is currently applying to the Environment Agency to increase its radioactive emissions to air.

Drawing on Mackenzie & Spinardi's research into the potential un-invention of nuclear weapons through the loss of tacit knowledge, this chapter explores a range of artistic responses to the 2011 Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster. Mackenzie & Spinardi's work on nuclear weapons design, testing and computing, allows us to think about a new mode of nuclear aesthetics, providing conceptual frameworks relevant to contemporary art practice and discourse such as: the contested nature of sameness in the repetition of objects; the importance of the slowness of tacit knowledge; of the human eye, making and learning with others; the limits of code; and the erosion of nuclear belief systems. Recent artistic practices in Japan and internationally, explore counterfactual possibilities across time; where aspects of nuclear culture are made visible or possible in a world where apocalyptic scenarios are streamed live. The responsibility for nuclear materials is shifting from state weapons production to the privatized nuclear energy industry, and into the public realm of nuclear accidents and public consultation on long-term waste disposal. Artists are concerned with how the networks are interrupted, looped, mapped, slowed down for reflection on how things are made, how stories are told, and how knowledge is consolidated.

The Nuclear Culture Source Book är en antologi som fungerar som en introduktion till hur kärnkraftskultur tagit plats i samtidskonsten. Boken fokuserar på hur händelser som Fukushima-olyckan har påverkat konstnärlig och kulturell produktion och tar ett samlat grepp om konstpraktiker som undersöker antropocen, platser för kärnkraftverk och materialitet, och andra frågor om radioaktivt arv, nukleär modernitet och det filosofiska konceptet strålning som hyperobjekt. 

The Nuclear Culture Source Book bygger på fyra års forskning om kärnkraftskultur av bokens redaktör, Ele Carpenter. Den innehåller bidrag från över 60 konstnärer och essäer av internationella skribenter: Peter C. van Wyck, "The Anthropocene's Signature"; Gabrielle Hecht, ”Nuclearity"; Tim Morton, "Radiation as Hyperobject"; Jahnavi Phalkey, "The Atomic Gift"; Noi Sawaragi, "Don't Follow the Wind"; Eiko Honda, "Atomic Subjectivity"; Susan Schuppli, "Trace Evidence: A Nuclear Trilogy"; Victor Gama, "Searching for Augusto Zita"; Nicola Triscott "on James Acord". 

Boken presenterar konstnärer som: Lise Autogena och Joshua Portway, Chim-Pom, Thomson & Craighead, Nick Crowe och Ian Rawlinson, Nina Fischer och Maroan El Sani, Dave Griffiths, Hilda Hellström, Martin Howse, Pierre Hughye, Miyamato Katsuhiro, Yoi Kawakubo, Yves Klein, Erika Kobayashi, Cecile Massart, Eva och Franco Mattes, Uriel Orlow, Trevor Paglen, Yelena Popova, Susan Schuppli, Taryn Simon, Smudge Studio, Shimpei Takeda, Kota Takeuchi, Mika Taanila, Suzanne Treister, Mark Aerial Waller, Andy Weir, Jane och Louise Wilson, Julia + Ken Yonetani. 

Boken togs fram i samband med utställningen Perpetual Uncertainty (2016), producerad av Bildmuseet och kuraterad av Ele Carpenter, Goldsmiths University of London. Boken publicerades i ett samarbete mellan Bildmuseet, Arts Catalyst och Black Dog Publishing. Ele Carpenter driver det konstnärliga forskningsprojektet Nuclear Culture vid organisationen Arts Catalyst i London.