Alastair Philip Wiper – Cold Comfort

LOCATION: Outdoor exhibition in park by Landskrona konsthall. MAP

We built a button that could end the world, then relied on luck, protocol, and a few sweaty phone calls to keep it from happening. Nuclear technology is at once our most ingenious achievement and our most catastrophic mistake—one that has displaced people, power, and meaning across the planet.

It has moved people from their homes, split atoms and nations, and shifted the balance of power, trust, and fear. It displaces life itself—from the cities evacuated after accidents, to the landscapes sealed for millennia, to the quiet rooms where radiation both heals and harms.

British photographer Alastair Philip Wiper’s project Cold Comfort explores the absurd theatre of the atomic age: secret weapons labs, hospitals using isotopes to save lives, fallout shelters for politicians, the architecture of survival, fusion machines that look like spaceships, and a culture that turned annihilation into comic books, candy bars, and cocktails. It is a story of both destruction and salvation—and of the physical, psychological, and temporal displacements that follow in the atom’s wake. The atom is innocent. The fallout belongs to us.

Alastair Philip Wiper (b. 1980, Hamburg) is an internationally recognized photographer working with industrial, scientific, and architectural subjects. His images are known for their strong sense of line, symmetry, colour, and contrast, often combined with subtle dark humour. His work has appeared in publications such as Wired and The Guardian, and is held in collections including the Design Museum in London and the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). He is the author of several books, including Building Stories (2023) and  Unintended Beauty (2020).