‘I only paint what I see’, says Vladimír Kokolia, one of the Czech Republic’s most established contemporary artists. For most, seeing the ordinary and the everyday’s an act of involuntary dismissal. For Kokolia, seeing the everyday’s wonderment. His first UK exhibition, Epiphany, hosted by the Ikon gallery in Birmingham, is a precious lesson in looking and seeing.…
| 18/07/2018
Rather than going to University in 1933, aspiring writer Paddy Leigh Fermor set out instead on his ‘great trudge’ to walk from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul. In the spring of 1935 in Athens and twenty years old, he met the beautiful Princess Balasha Cantacuzène, fifteen years older than him, at a drinks party.…
| 09/07/2018
I entered the small exhibition space of the Bulgarian Cultural Institute in London and was immediately drawn in by a close-up portrait of a young Jewish boy. His eyes were alive and rejoicing, bringing a sense of peace and harmony. The brief description of the photograph, in both Bulgarian and English, reads: Purim at the…
| 27/06/2018
Assa starts with a bang: a sequence of spellbinding opening credits in lurid pink playing over footage of two drummers, skinny youths in tatty clothes and dirty blond hair. It ends with a bang, too. Viktor Tsoi, legendary frontman of Russian rock band Kino, strides onto the screen to sing his famous anthem ‘Peremen!’ –…
| 22/06/2018
In her welcome to the event, Eszter Pataki, Director of the Hungarian Culture Centre and a former journalist, pronounced that ‘the Roma community is part of the shared culture in Hungary’, yet ‘many stereotypical images exist in the media even in the UK.’ The phrase ‘of Eastern European appearance’ always appears in a negative context.…
| 21/06/2018
For one part of the novel, Augustin Buzura’s Report on the State of Loneliness is exactly what the title describes: an old man sits in a remote mountain hut, pondering about death and a long life, which is reaching its end. Throughout his lamentations, we sense the despair of an aged intellectual coming to terms…
| 13/06/2018
Mircea Eliade’s Gaudeamus, written in 1928, is loosely a sequel to the successful Diary of a Short-Sighted Adolescent, whose title speaks sufficiently for itself. The story’s continuation’s also a journal presented as a novel, this time a constellation of moral struggles and desires during the protagonist’s three university years as a philosophy student in interwar…
| 02/06/2018
Armed secret police were everywhere during the dress rehearsal for Maklena Grasa – in the dressing rooms with the actors, in the wings and members of the notorious Cheka were crammed into every seat of the theatre. Written by Mykola Kulish in 1933, Maklena Grasa was seen as a deviation of Soviet Ukrainian culture by the Soviet…
| 25/05/2018
In Stanislav Rostotsky’s 1968 film We’ll live ‘til Monday, screened last week at the Regent Street Cinema as part of Kino Klassika’s ‘Youth on the March!’ film season, three schoolteachers play out hopes and regrets in midst of an atmosphere of youthful rebellion. English teacher Natasha’s young and idealistic, and deeply in love with her…
| 15/05/2018
To celebrate the fantastic world of filmmaker Jiří Brdečka (1917-1982), one of the founding fathers of Czech animation, the Czech Centre London and Limonádový Joe s.r.o. organised a screening of eight of Brdečka’s short animations at Regent Street Cinema, followed by a Q&A with the artist’s daughter, Tereza Brdečková. Brdečka’s talents ranged from journalism to…
| 08/05/2018