War has not stopped the Kiev Biennale. It has multiplied.
Containment is a strategy that only works for so long; the war will not stay, the war will come to you. The Kiev Biennale, an important part of contemporary art in Eastern Europe for the past decade, has opened its fifth edition on time and on a full scale, but not (or not mainly) at home. It has fled and spread beyond the borders of Ukraine. It has multiplied into a major European festival about war, democracy and the diminishing promise of solidarity. It has the ambition of a scholar, but the style of a slacker; it spans a continent, even though it is anchored in Kiev. It is the most energetic exhibition of the year.
I say that even though I’ve only seen a fraction of it: the part set in Vienna, where independent art spaces in the city have handed over their galleries to their Ukrainian colleagues and friends. (Much of modern-day Ukraine was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and today Vienna remains the only city in so-called Western Europe with a direct train connection to Kiev.) This year’s Kiev Biennale has more than 50 people gathered. artists and collectives to his temporary Austrian exile, with artists from Ukraine, some still at home and others refugees, exhibiting alongside others from Poland, Slovakia and Romania, but also from Colombia, Cuba and Syria.
In Vienna’s leafy Leopoldstadt district, I saw forensic analyzes of war crimes, as well as underdressed voguers writhing on Ukrainian electronics. In a former car dealership, I took a virtual reality walk through a ruined Soviet sculpture studio. An empty office in the 20th district, rich in immigrants, has become a neighborhood of strange Kiev, with testimonies of gay soldiers on the front line collected by Anton Shebetko, and a bitterly funny documentary by the young artist Vladislav Plisetsky about the life of club boys in wartime. .
But the Kiev-in-Vienna show is only half of it. Just as many artists participate in the programming of the Kiev Biennale in six other cities, as well as in their hometown. The show opened in early October at the Dovzhenko Center, Kiev’s film institute and one of the most dynamic of all Ukrainian cultural institutions, where more than a dozen artists and filmmakers scoured the history of Soviet cinema for an exhibition on the theme of the Dnipro. , the river that flows through the capital. This was followed by premieres in Ivano-Frankivsk and Uzhhorod, two cities in the relatively safe west of Ukraine, by both foreigners and displaced persons from the east.
Last week, a crucial part of the biennale opened in Lublin, Poland, not far from the border with Ukraine: an exhibition of works by painters, photographers and musicians from the Ukrainian armed forces, some still on the front lines, others recovering from injuries. “Many Ukrainian artists, for various reasons, fell out of their practice,” one of the biennale’s curators, Serge Klymko, told me at the opening in Vienna, amid a horde of young Ukrainians, many of them now in the city. “One of the points was to reunite the community that was torn apart by the war.”
That all this has come together at such a scale and speed, inside and outside Ukraine, is a testament to the trust that has been built over the years between independent Ukrainian artists and their colleagues in Central and Eastern Europe. You can’t raise money for a major exhibition so quickly, and to share the burden, the Kyiv Biennale has relied on its friends Tranzit, a network of independent art institutions from Budapest to Warsaw, who have defended free speech against a variety of populist governments and corporate encroachments.
And unlike the dozens of other biennials and triennials that swept across the world in the 2000s, Kyiv has never been run by a culture ministry or development agency. Most of the funding for the 2023 edition will come from the European Union and from American and European foundations. Ukrainian men cannot leave the country without special permission under the current martial law; Many of their works are digital videos or small objects and works on paper, which they carry by hand on the bus or train.
“Obviously, due to the dire situation we find ourselves in, we had to change our usual modus operandi,” he said. Vasyl Cherepanyn, founder of Kiev’s Visual Culture Research Center, which organizes the biennale. “We can’t just take a bunch of good names and people from abroad and bring them to Kiev. But at the same time, we are not a state actor. It is an initiative that comes completely from the bottom up. Even institutional cooperation within Ukraine is strongly based on informal or personal contacts. If the state mechanisms are disrupted, the informal part remains.”
Like many good things about Ukrainian culture, the Kyiv Biennale emerged from the Maidan Revolution, the 2014 democratic uprising that ousted the country’s Kremlin-backed president. Maidan heralded a nationwide cultural renewal and Kiev experienced an explosion of activity in the fields of art, fashion and especially electronic music. But the revolution, and the Russian annexation of Crimea and the war in the Donbas that followed, also caused a careless destruction of Kiev’s Soviet-era public spaces, as nationalists took out their current frustrations on the monuments of the past.
From the beginning, the biennale has sought to reflect through site-specific projects amid Kiev’s unloved and endangered 20th-century architecture Through The Soviet history of Ukraine, rather than externalizing it as some kind of Russian intervention. This decolonial approach to the Soviet past has taken on profound new importance during the large-scale war. As Russia continues its direct attack on Ukraine’s cultural heritage, so do the Ukrainian authorities tear down statues and sand away murals. The biennale has always aimed for a subtler look at history, and in Vienna, the De Ne De Collective – a group of artists who have led the conservation efforts for Soviet murals and mosaics in eastern Ukraine – has a gallery littered with the shards of a chandelier from a destroyed cinema in Dnipro.
Yet this is certainly not an ’emergency biennial’, nor is she satisfied with the nasty idea that an exhibition can prevent the bombs from falling. (“They feel a lot of solidarity,” Cherepanyn said mockingly of the audience during those “awareness shows,” “but then they return to their daily lives.”) By reuniting Ukrainian artists with European colleagues who performed at previous biennials, such as Hito Steyerl and Wolfgang Tillmans, this show makes it clear that Kiev is already a central hub in Europe’s cultural networks. The Kiev Biennale 2023 does not want to show the Viennese public that a disaster is happening ‘elsewhere’. It aims to demonstrate that we are all already facing threats to a common democratic future – and that it is too late to avoid the fight.
The full-scale war has now entered its twentieth month. Kiev is still standing, but the counter-offensive has been slow, and a new and much more hopeless conflict in the Middle East has overshadowed the ongoing violence. (According to Ukrainian officials, Russia shelled more Ukrainian towns and villages on November 1 than on any other day this year.) When Cherepanyn first saw the CCTV footage of murdered ravers in the Israeli desert, he told me, “I had the feeling that I am back to Bucha.” The Kyiv Biennale looks directly at the Israeli-Palestinian situation, most notably in a video by Czech artist Tomáš Kajánek of American tourists in Israel cheerfully participating in a “security training” course. As I passed through Vienna for this truly important show, however, it was difficult not to worry that its democratic and consensual spirit was already disappearing.
One of the most beautiful and somber works at the 2023 Kyiv Biennale was created by Nikolay Karabinovych, a young Jewish artist and DJ from Odessa. It is called ‘The story of the city where two colors disappeared’ and consists of street scenes in cloudy, untidy Brussels: bakery, gas station, parking garage, construction site. There’s not much to look at here, until you see a small sticker with the Ukrainian flag peeling from a shop window, and then another sticker obscured by an advertisement. Suddenly you find yourself searching for fleeting visions of blue and yellow – the colors of Ukraine, but also the colors of Europe, the colors of a promise we thought we had made to peace – in this dull cityscape. They appear only briefly and already fade away.
Kyiv Biennale 2023
Until December 14 at various locations in Vienna and elsewhere in Europe; 2023.kyivbiennale.org.