Bessarabsky Market with display from the Sexuality and Transcendence exhibit.jpg

memorial candles to remember those lost

Pinchuk Art Centre, never far from controversy

Art Meets Sex—In Kyiv?  Ukraine's Surprisingly Avant-garde Capital

Kyiv's main avenue, Khreschatyk, ends at Bessarabsky Square, location of the must-see Pinchuk Art Centre.  Pinchuk Art Centre has been causing a stir in Ukraine since its opening in 2006 and the current exhibit shows why.  Called Sexuality And Transcendence, it is an exhibit that Australia's conservative protectors would never allow to be displayed.  After all, there are children to protect!  And who was in attendance in Kyiv?  Adolescents in the latest fashions, adults with grandmothers in cheap polyester skirts and requisite kerchiefs, young couples with—say not so—toddlers and grade-school children  So nice to see generations comfortable with the human body and its natural functions; despite the explicit nature of the displays, not one person required post-exhibit psychiatric counselling.  Most impressive of all is the fact that such as exhibit is being shown in Ukraine rather than Paris or Tokyo; it would never have seen the light of day in supposedly enlightened cities like Los Angeles or Melbourne. 

The Sexuality And Transcendence exhibit—which is free, by the way—also includes Kyiv's famous Bessarabsky Market across the street, making for an even more surreal scene of wrinkled babushkas selling vegetables under enormous murals of attractive men and women in a variety of provocative images.  Ukrainian women such as eternally gorgeous Kyiv native Milla Jovovich are famous for their beauty, but some Ukrainians are famous for other reasons.  Zino Davidoff—think cigars and Cool Water—was born in Kyiv, as was Ballets Russes star Serge Lifar, whose ballet Suite en blanc was created in 1943 for the Australian Ballet and remains a component of its repertoire to this day.

Just as confrontational, albeit in another way, is the National Museum's subtly beautiful and very moving Memorial in Commemoration of the Famine's Victims In Ukraine.  Ukraine is also in the intellectual vanguard in facing down its often tragic history with proud reminders of the Ukrainian people's resilience and resistance to cultural subsumption.  We in the West often know so little about the details of other countries' histories, whether they include glories or atrocities; for Australians and New Zealanders, they are far removed from our own experiences and difficult to comprehend in the fullest.  This new memorial, opened in July 2009, is a monument to those who perished during the systematic starvation forced on Ukraine in 1932-33, a period known as the Golodomor.  The sadness of the topic is countered by fearless presentation and beautifully symbolic creation of the memorial in the Pechersk Hills, one of Kyiv's most scenic spots just near the UNESCO World Heritage Pechersk-Lavra monastery.

Pechersk-Lavra monastery in the Pechersk Hills

The symbolic candle at the famine memorial