A huge multi-media exhibition in Moscow by British filmmaker Peter Greenaway has failed to escape tensions over the Ukraine crisis.
The event, which showcases the short-lived but powerful Russian Avant-Garde movement of the late 19th-early 20th century, opened Monday — with British officials conspicuously absent.
Greenaway, 72, celebrated worldwide for films like “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover”, and his wife, Dutch director Saskia Boddeke, together created the video installation for the UK-Russia Year of Culture in 2014.
Both were on hand for the gala opening but “unfortunately for known reasons, there is no political presence of our British partners,” Russian President Vladimir Putin’s cultural representative Mikhail Shvydkoi told a news conference.
