NICKY LARKIN

BIOGRAPHY

Nicky Larkin was born in Birr,Ireland in 1983.  He studied fine art in G.M.I.T Cluain Mhuire – Galway and Chelsea College of Art, London.  His work is located somewhere in the crossover between video-art, documentary and experimental film.

He has exhibited widely across Ireland and the UK, including ev+a 2006, Limerick, e-merge in The Galway Arts Centre, and Catalyst Arts Centre in Belfast.  In 2007 he travelled to the Chernobyl exclusion zone where he shot the experimental short, Pripyat, which has been screened as part of The European Media Art Festival 2008 in Osnabruck, Germany.

He had a solo show in The Belltable Arts Centre, Limerick, in October 2008, based on his trip to Chernobyl.

You can visit Nicky’s Website here: www.nickylarkin.com

PRIPYAT – VIDEO WORK STATEMENT

The city of Pripyat was once considered the finest place to live in the whole of the Soviet Union.  A thoroughly modern city, it was built in 1970 to house the workers of the new Chernobyl nuclear power-plant and their families, and was once a happy home to 50,000 people.  In the aftermath of the accident in April 1986, the residents were instructed to pack one suitcase and told they would be returning in three days.  One thousand buses were drafted in from all across the Soviet Union to take the residents of Pripyat out of their now highly contaminated home.  They never returned.  21 years later Pripyat stands empty, a ghost town deep within the exclusion zone, the last remaining Soviet city.  This haunting experimental film by Irish artist Nicky Larkin takes you inside Pripyat and examines the relationship between time, nature and culture, in a city that will never be lived in again.

Directed by Nicky Larkin

Running Time: 16 minutes

Selected for The European Media Art Festival 2008, Osnabruck, Germany www.emaf.de

SINK SYSTEMS – 2007 – VIDEO WORK STATEMENT