Yulia Belousova

Ephemeral Dinner is a series of one-night, experimental dinners that Yulia Belousova has been creating since 2012. The project emerged as an alternative to formal gallery dinners and closed art-world structures where roles and hierarchies are fixed in advance.
Each edition is built around an exhibition by a young emerging artist, paired with an invited established artist who joins the evening as a mentor. This mentorship unfolds through cooking, hosting and sharing time together — dissolving hierarchy and creating a shared artistic situation where roles remain fluid and relational.
In Ephemeral Dinner, distinctions between artist, audience and host fall away. Everyone enters the same multilayered environment, becoming participant, collaborator and witness at once. The dinner becomes a temporary structure where positions shift naturally and nothing is predefined.
The format is simple: one evening, one space, one emerging artist, and two invited artists from different generations who cook and shape the atmosphere together. The outcome is always unpredictable. What matters is what happens between people — the conversations, the pauses, the coincidences, the energy of being together.
Over the past decade, Ephemeral Dinner has taken place in Berlin, Barcelona, Milan, Moscow, Palermo and the south of France, adapting to each context — apartments, studios, courtyards, galleries, a museum setting, and even the Ballarò Market during Manifesta 12 in Palermo.
Past mentor artists include Andreas Golder, Martin Eder, Fausta Squatriti, Bosco Sodi, Peter Böhnisch and Kerim Seiler.
Ephemeral Dinner is not gastronomy and not a performance in the conventional sense. It is art as a social field, where food functions as a tool to build a temporary, shared space in which viewers become part of the work itself. The piece exists only for one night and never repeats.
Ephemerality is not an effect — it is the principle.
Everything disappears, except the experience.