ULM.- Forty years after the explosion at Reactor 4 changed Europe forever, the name Chernobyl still carries a heavy echo. At Stadthaus Ulm, a new photography exhibition looks back at that moment—not as a closed chapter of history, but as an ongoing question about nature, humanity, and time itself.

Running from January 24 to May 25, 2026, the exhibition brings together the work of seven international artists who have each approached Chernobyl from a different angle. What unites them is not spectacle, but attention: to what remains, to what has returned, and to what has been quietly erased.

When the world stopped—and nature did not

On April 26, 1986, a radioactive cloud from Chernobyl drifted across Europe. A 30-kilometer zone around the power plant was evacuated and sealed off. Cities like Pripyat emptied overnight. Schools, homes, and personal belongings were left behind, frozen in time.

Decades later, nature has reclaimed the exclusion zone with a persistence that feels almost unsettling. This paradox lies at the heart of the exhibition. “In retrospect, the nuclear disaster caused less damage to the natural environment than the continuous impact of humans,” says curator Volker Kreidler—a thought he explores in his own photographic work Third Landscape.

A world without humans?

One of the most striking contributions is Chernobyl Safari by Anna Jermolaewa. Using wildlife cameras placed deep inside the exclusion zone, her video work quietly answers a provocative question: Is a world without humans even conceivable?

The images suggest that it is. Animals roam freely. Forests grow unchecked. Life goes on—without us.

In another deeply poetic moment, Kreidler recalls discovering a children’s herbarium in an abandoned school in Pripyat. Once radioactive, the dried plants are now harmless due to the half-life of barium. Carefully pressed leaves and flowers, assembled by children decades ago, survive as fragile witnesses of everyday life before the disaster. They show no visible trace of the catastrophe that followed.

Remembering the people who lived there

While nature dominates much of the visual landscape, several artists focus firmly on human memory. Maxim Dondyuk, Pierpaolo Mittica, and Viktoria Ivleva turn their lenses toward the people of Chernobyl—those who left, and those who stayed.

Since 2016, Dondyuk has been recovering objects from abandoned homes: photographs, letters, film negatives. Small, intimate fragments of lives interrupted. Mittica sought out the few residents who never left the exclusion zone, as well as those who continue to work there today, largely unnoticed by the outside world. Ivleva, meanwhile, brings a unique historical perspective—she was the first journalist allowed inside Reactor 4 in 1991, documenting what few had ever seen.

Thinking a million years ahead

The exhibition does not stop at memory. Swiss artist Marcel Rickli looks radically forward with his series AEON. His work asks a chillingly practical question: how can we warn people one million years from now about the locations of nuclear waste repositories?

The question feels uncomfortably close to home. The region around Ulm is currently being examined as a potential site for such a repository, with a decision expected around 2050. Rickli’s work reminds visitors that nuclear disasters are not only about the past—but about responsibilities that extend far beyond our own lifetimes.

Local history, global consequences

For Ulm-based artist Andreas Thaler, the global story of nuclear power intersects with local history. In the shadow of cooling towers, he documents a 1772 “blood-ban cross”—a symbol once associated with authority over life and death. Its presence near nuclear infrastructure adds another layer to the exhibition’s quiet but persistent question: who decides, and at what cost?

Accompanying the show is a special publication titled Chernobyl, part of the edition stadthaus series. Journalist Michael Seefelder traces the history of the atomic age as it unfolded in Gundremmingen, alongside short texts and images by all participating artists. The book is available for €5 at Stadthaus Ulm and online.

In the end, this exhibition does not offer easy conclusions. Instead, it invites visitors to slow down—to look at what remains, what returns, and what we may one day leave behind. Forty years after Chernobyl, the silence still speaks.