Kyiv Biennial, a project of the Visual Culture Research Center, is an international forum for socially and politically engaged art. In 2023, the fifth edition of the Kyiv Biennial began in different venues around Ukraine and Europe, putting Ukrainian artists displaced by war and their foreign counterparts in conversation. The main exhibition was held in Vienna – a city with great ties to the history of the Biennial – and featured works from nearly sixty Ukrainian and international artists exploring the topics of authoritarianism, colonialism and war.
This year, Kyiv Biennial program continues in Berlin, marking the tenth anniversary of the Revolution of Dignity and the Russian war against Ukraine. With the title Kyiv Perennial – lasting, persisting – the Berlin edition of the Biennial aims to reflect on the events of the Ukrainian past, as well as envision its future. The IWM’s Documenting Ukraine program is a partner of the Kyiv Perennial, continuing the IWM’s nearly decade-long collaboration with the Kyiv Biennial, stretching back to the first edition in 2015.
Kyiv Perennial features panel discussions, exhibitions, public lectures and film screening to be held in four venues around Berlin: Neue Gesellschaft Für Bildende Kunst (NGbK), Station Urbaner Kulturen/NGbK Hellersdorf, Between Bridges and Prater Galerie.
The public program began on 16 February 2024 with a keynote Wonder Woman and the Orcs: Ukrainian History and Western Fables by historian and IWM Permanent Fellow Timothy Snyder. During the three-day opening weekend on 23-25 February 2024, each venue was given a spotlight with concerts, exhibitions and presentations. On 29 February 2024, The Reckoning Project presented the film CHORNOBYL 22 by Oleksiy Radynskiy.
On March 9, almost to the day two years after the Russian airstrike on the Mariupol Drama Theater, one of the worst atrocities committed by Russia during the current war, the Center for Spatial Technologies introduces its work A Сity Within a Building, presenting it in its entirety for the first time after two years of research. Through hours of interviews with survivors of the attack, the joint research project with the Berlin-based group Forensis reassembles the living world of the theater, where more than 1,000 people had sought refuge at the time of the bombing.
On March 16, a panel discussion with literary scholar Epp Annus, historian Franziska Davies, and researcher Darya Tsymbalyuk reverses the discourse of decolonization from the West towards Europe’s East with an eye on the post-Soviet and post-socialist context, where the history of Russian and German colonial projects intersect. In another panel on March 23, researcher and curator Kateryna Iakovlenko, writer Yassin al-Haj Saleh, and historian Jan Tomasz Gross share perspectives on recurring experiences of displacement, from World War II to the war in Syria and Russia’s war against Ukraine.
Accompanying the exhibition and public program, a poster project draws attention to Russia's ongoing war in Ukraine and contextualizes it as a war within and against Europe. The artists Pavel Brăila, Uliana Bychenkova, Experimental Jetset, Marina Naprushkina, Aliona Solomadina, and Wolfgang Tillmans were invited to create one poster each with the leading question: What will happen to Europe if the war against Ukraine continues for ten more years? Half of the print-run of the posters will be flyposted in Berlin and the other half will be available for free at the different locations of Kyiv Perennial.
You can read more about the Kyiv Perennial and find the program of the event by the following link.
