The Exhibition opened recently at Kyiv’s L’Art Gallery emerges as a whimsical combination of video, choreographic, and athletic effects. Its subject matter is made up of video miniatures by the French troupe of Magali and Didier Mulleras, along with a series of photos by Kyiv artist Ilia Chychkan. The latter cuts a rather colorful figure on the capital’s actual scene. He is given to shocking visual gesticulation (suffice it to recall his last year’s Sleeping Princes cycle using dead human embryos). This time Chychkan has taken another sharp bend, coming out with what can be described as formal portraits of girl gymnasts, done during training sessions of the Ukrainian Olympic national artistic gymnastics team. Supple minors are photographed in a very adult manner, with “stage props” and professional makeup. The result is a Lolita-like effect: a meditation on children maturing ahead of their age with a criminal touch, a combination which, quite naturally, sends one’s mind and blood racing.

The Mulleras troupe’s so-called microscale choreography is something of a response to Chychkan’s nymphets. Here it is not so much peeping as a wittily resolved problem of power. Actually, what the French jokers do reminds one of an exercise in Gulliver’s court theater. The tiny figures of dancers work choreographic miracles, but only up to a point when some outer Hand interferes which perhaps wants to join the dancers or stop the performance, perhaps envious of the light graceful pirouettes. The result is an exotic cartoon world, where life is short but passes in dancing and music, surrounded by fairy-tale landscapes.

And so the Exhibition is not so much about bare flesh as about the body’s vulnerability. Millions of eyes watch the young gymnasts, taking away their childhood. The hand is aimed at the tiny dancers, stopping their movement. Naturally, everything happens beautifully, amusing numerous visitors. After all, freedom and its antonym have one thing in common: conditions rich in visual opportunities in the first place, capable of inspiring one to create ever new spectacles.

Yet, there is obviously more bondage to the Exhibition.