Sand Artist, Kseniya Simonova, Winner of "2009 Ukraine's Got Talent"

Once in a while, if I need a dose of real-life fairy tale, I'd google and watch videos on Paul Potts and Susan Boyle all over again.

If you recall, Paul Potts (who sings opera) won Britain's Got Talent one year while Susan Boyle stunned everyone with her amazing singing and almost won Britain's Got Talent last year. Both of their videos garnered millions of visits.

The same traffic is seen this time on Kseniya Simonova's video - more than 2.9 million and counting. Ms Simonova, 24, is a sand artist and moved audiences to tears on the way to winning the 2009 Ukraine's Got Talent competition. Here's the video.



Miss Simonova's talent performance (for lack of a better term) was on sand art or more appropriately, sand animation. She draws a series of pictures on an illuminated sand table showing how ordinary people were affected by the German invasion during World War II. The image is projected onto a large screen.

Her artistry begins with her creating a scene of a couple sitting on a bench holding hands under a starry sky, but warplanes spoiled the happy scene.

It is then replaced by a woman’s crying face. A baby arrives and the woman smiles again. Once again war returns and Miss Simonova portrays this by throwing sand chaotically from which a young woman’s face appears. She quickly becomes an old widow, her face wrinkled and sad, before the image turns into a monument to an Unknown Soldier.

This outdoor scene becomes framed by a window as if the viewer is looking out on the monument from within a house.

In the final scene, a mother and child appear inside and a man standing outside, with his hands pressed against the glass, as if saying goodbye.

The Great Patriotic War, as it is called in Ukraine, resulted in one in four of the population being killed with eight to 11 million deaths out of a population of 42 million.


Source: Telegraph.co.uk