Diana Thater’s video installation “Chernobyl” appropriately brings the theme of man-made disaster to the first of David Zwirner’s three gallery spaces to be reactivated after their thorough dousing by Hurricane Sandy. The 15-minute piece covers all available wall space with eerie images of Prypiat, a city built in the early 1970s for workers at the Chernobyl reactor in northwest Ukraine and hastily abandoned after that reactor’s nuclear meltdown in 1986.
Self-referentially, the images center on the rubble-strewn interior of a movie theater, projecting the four walls of this space onto the gallery’s walls. Additional video shots layered over these show decaying buildings, machinery and tanks, a statue of Lenin, overgrown fields, herds of wild horses, swans gliding around a lake, as well as other visitors, some of whom carry video cameras and may be part of Ms. Thater’s crew.