Nothing resembles human life so much as the sand that spills between your fingers, says an ancient Chinese maxim. Armed with this philosophy, the organizers of Long Art, the Kyiv-based international festival of sand sculptures, launched its fourth annual exhibition last Wednesday.
This year the festival’s theme is “Factory of Illusions” (favorite movies and film characters). This means that all those who came to the Sun City beach on the eve of St. John the Baptist’s Day were in for an entertaining event that gathered a number of celebrities — well-known artists, sculptors, actors and writers — and many other aficionados of “live” sculpture, as sand and ice sculpting is sometimes called. Over the past few years the festival has become one of the Ukrainian capital’s drawing cards. Festivals of ice and sand sculptures, popular in many countries where they draw hundreds of thousands of visitors, are held every year in Germany, the US, Canada, Belgium, Denmark, Japan, and Russia. People who love to experiment and fill every moment with drive and energy visit Kyiv’s marvelous festival year after year. The Longer trademark, popular among young people, has been the festival’s general sponsor for the past two years. Last year the festival, timed to the Eurovision Song Contest in Kyiv, drew more than 100,000 visitors and attracted much attention from national and foreign mass media.
The festival participants are young artists, sculptors and designers from Ukraine, China, and Russia, who used about 200 tons of special quarry sand to erect sculptures over two meters tall. This year’s celebration features sand sculptures as well as four objects made of original decorative materials. The masters are going to work on their pieces day and night for a week, preparing a fantastic show for their visitors. But the scorching sun rays will not burn the sculptors’ skin, as many spectators might think, because they will be protected from excessive sun exposure by the festival’s partner, Nivea Sun, which has given every participant a special set of sun protectors.
The thrilling process of sculpting will be followed by the opening ceremonies and the distribution of awards. This year, for the first time, the Grand Prix winner will be selected not by a jury but the public. Midnight sand sculpture buffs have a discotheque at their disposal with the popular Moscow DJ Oleg Kostrov (“A Knife for Frau Mueller”).
The exhibition is open to the public throughout July and August. The sculptors will do their best to retain the original shape of their sculptures. The festival, spon sored by Kyiv’s Dniprovsky Raion Administration and the Pleso Company, was organized by the Amavi Design Studio. The well-known Ukrainian sculptor Oleh Pinchuk is the festival’s honorary president. Among the regular guests and friends of the festival are graphic artist Serhiy Poyarkov, writer Andriy Kurkov, pop singer Ruslana Lyzhychko, actors Ostap Stupka, Olha Sumska, Volodymyr Horiansky, and other celebrities.
