I’m at the "Ya Gallery"(Я Галерея) in central Kyiv for the opening of a new exhibition, Mr Gold, curated by Pavlo Gudimov, whose Gudimov Art Project is always coming up with interesting ideas (googling turns up, inter alia, the fact that Pavlo used to be in the excellent Ukrainian rock band Okean Elzy and is also part of something called the Ya Design Group).
I won’t try and summarise the gold-themed exhibition, except to note that Pavlo tells me gold is "both sacred and glamorous". Several of the artists are there including Tiberii Silvashi, author of the gold slabs, who tells me his work is inspired in part by Mark Rothko; and Alevtina Kakhidze, who I last met at the "Online Kyiv Offline" event at the residence last November (reported in my blog "Cyberpunks and the Matrix").
A great show, to which these photos from my phone don’t really do justice.
Leigh Turner has been the British Ambassador to Ukraine since June 2008. You can read all his blog entries at blogs.fco.gov.uk/roller/turnerenglish (in English) or blogs.fco.gov.uk/roller/turner/ (Ukrainian)
