News from the art world
Ukraine’s statue wars
Across Ukraine, statues commemorating the country’s historical ties to Russia are being removed, say Lorenzo Tondo and Isobel Koshiw in The Guardian. In Kyiv, an “imposing Soviet-era monument symbolising the friendship between Russia and Ukraine” was toppled last week; when the figure representing a Russian worker was accidentally decapitated, hundreds of people applauded. Even Serhii Myrhorodskyi, the architect who designed it, approved. “It is the right thing to do," he said. Some parts of the “de-Russification” plan, which aims to demolish about 60 “colonial” monuments linked to Russia, are controversial, though – such as the proposal to remove a statue of the writer Mikhail Bulgakov (who was born in Ukraine, but held “derogatory views” towards it) and to rename Kyiv’s Leo Tolstoy metro station. Meanwhile, in the territories it has occupied since February, Russia has been restoring monuments linked to the state’s Soviet past, which have been removed since 2015.
India Jones and the looted treasures
By day, S Vijay Kumar works as a shipping accountant in Chennai. In his spare time, however, “he leads a team searching for India’s looted treasures”, says Saptarshi Ray in The Times. Dubbed “India Jones” by his admirers, Kumar, 48, has helped to repatriate hundreds of artefacts over the course of the past decade, many of which were discovered in the collections of some of the world’s most prestigious museums. His interest in his country’s past began at an early age, with visits to temples and museums. “I realised much of our Indian art and heritage was not available, in the way it should be available.” Many of the objects he seeks through his detective work were spirited away from India in colonial times by the British and other European powers with a presence on the subcontinent. Until recently, the Indian authorities have “been lax in pursuing some of these artefacts”, Kumar says. “But there is an increasing movement to repatriate objects” around the world, and he believes that India must “use that in its favour”.