Power, historically, has never simply ruled — it has served looks. Diplomacy learned to seduce; justice learned to intimidate — both, it turns out, through the same instinct for spectacle. In Amber Room and Star Chamber (Kyiv Colours), Kasper Bosmans superimposes two such costumes of authority — the Amber Room, gifted by Frederick of Prussia to Peter the Great in 1717 to cement a military alliance, and the Star Chamber, the secretive English court whose starred ceiling presided over the arbitrary punishment of the politically inconvenient — into a single, gleaming surface of wallpaper, amber, and plexiglass.

What emerges is not a monument, but a costume. Bosmans treats sovereignty as a matter of ornament. This is authority caught in the act of over-dressing — an exuberance so deliberate it borders on drag. Read this way, the piece performs its subject rather than illustrating it: a masquerade of legitimacy, staged through sheer material excess, not unlike queer strategies of camp…