Kyiv Perennial - February 23–June 9, 2024, Berlin
Kyiv Perennial opens in Berlin from February 23–25, 2024, symbolically marking the 10th anniversary of the Maidan Revolution and the 10th year of the Russian war against Ukraine.
It is a continuation of the pan-European edition of the Kyiv Biennial 2023, which took place in several Ukrainian and EU cities. The Berlin edition is funded by Kulturstiftung des Bundes (German Federal Cultural Foundation) in a cooperation. A multi-part exhibition and an extensive program of events span four venues: nGbK Berlin two locations on Alexanderplatz and in Hellersdorf, Between Bridges, and Prater Galerie.
Russia’s ongoing invasion has given rise to a new wave of investigative, research-based, and documentary approaches deployed by artists, activists, and journalists in order to gather evidence of war crimes, trace the impact of neo-fascist propaganda, and attempt to bring the perpetrators to justice. Kyiv Perennial showcases and fosters these documentary artistic practices and reorients them away from merely reckoning with the past toward imagining a dignified future. Documentary-based approaches, understood not as a documentation of artistic activities but as a (re)presentation of the evidence of the emergencies of war, contain an underestimated potential of the political power of truth. The idea and form of the document in both forensic and philosophical senses can serve as one of the guiding principles for the conception and production of artworks today in order to counter the dominant neoliberal logic in contemporary art, becoming a prescribed remedy against hollow image-making in the current aesthetics.
As well as reaching out to the original meaning of curatorship, the documentary-oriented biennial project stresses one fundamental potential of art that is almost forgotten today – to make visible and to show in order to perceive and to understand. In line with prefigurative politics, Kyiv Perennial collectively explores and devises institutional practices, investigative documentations, and artistic imagery towards possible exit strategies from the current deadlock of war, authoritarianism, and colonial domination by forging forms of political imagination and inventing post-imperial futures.
Free admission to all locations and events.
Kyiv Biennial is the international forum for art, knowledge and politics that integrates exhibitions and discussion platforms. Organized by the Visual Culture Research Center.
