KYIV BIENNIAL 2023

KYIV BIENNIAL 2023 as guest of Neuer Kunstverein Wien.

The fifth edition of the Kyiv Biennial will take place across Europe at locations in Kyiv, Ivano-Frankivsk, Uzhhorod, Berlin, Warsaw, Lublin, Antwerp and Vienna as the main exhibition venue. In view of the brutal Russian attack on Ukraine, a comprehensive biennial project in Kyiv long seemed deeply uncertain, if not impossible. But, with a cascade of openings—starting in Kyiv in October 2023, finishing in Berlin in 2024—the fifth Kyiv Biennial will be taking place.

The project aims to reintegrate the Ukrainian artistic community, divided by war and scattered across Europe, and to enable its actors to work together with international colleagues and partners on the cultural, social and environmental challenges Ukraine is currently facing and to place them in a global context. Artistic images, investigative documentations and institutional practices will be explored with regard to possible exit strategies from the current impasse of war, authoritarianism and colonialism, where the scenarios for a new Ukraine beyond war could even be imagined. The decentralized European Kyiv Biennial will be an important and at the same time “introductory gesture” that creates bridges and pillars for a long-time relationship with Ukraine on a personal as well as institutional level, which will remain beyond the projects carried out in Autumn 2023.

From the first conceptual ideas in May, the project in Vienna aimed to contribute to reintegrating the Ukrainian artistic community, divided by the war and scattered all over Europe. Members of that community were to be given an opportunity to reflect, together with international colleagues and partners, on the cultural, social, and environmental challenges currently facing them personally and for Ukraine as a whole, as well as to place these challenges within a transnational context. The dialogues between the works of nearly 60 Ukrainian and international artists therefore form the core of the project.

Concrete, productive exchanges between the participating artists and the broader cultural scene in Vienna, in Ukraine and in the diaspora, and their international colleagues seem to us to be the crucial aspect of the exhibition constellations at Augarten Contemporary and in independent spaces around the city. Addressing the question of what true cultural-political solidarity with a war-torn country means, the main exhibition aims, as part of the overall framing of the entire Kyiv Biennial 2023, to explore concepts for an institutional infrastructure of art and culture in the wartime and post-war period that creates cross-cutting connections between Ukraine, Austria, and Europe as a whole.

Participating Artists (Vienna):
AKT, VItalii Atanasov, Abdul Sharif Oluwafemi Baruwa, Kateryna Aliinyk, Boji, Bohdan Bunchak, Daria Chernyshova, Anna Daučíková, DE NE DE, Gelitin, Majd Abdel Hamid, Ksenia Hnylytska, Nikita Kadan, Tomáš Kajánek, Nikolay Karabinovych, Dana Kavelina, Alina Kleytman, Július Koller, Zofia Kulik, The Laundry Collective, Hamlet Lavastida, Livyj Bereh, Mary Lydon, Kateryna Lysovenko, Mangelos, Judy Millar, mountaincutters, Yves Netzhammer, Daniel Otero Torres, Dan Perjovschi, Laure Prouvost, Remembering Peace, Georgia Sagri, Ashley Hans Scheirl, Toni Schmale, Anton Shebetko, Nicole Six & Paul Petritsch, Alisa Sizykh, Miriam Stoney, Superflex, Wolfgang Tillmans, Bogdan Tomashevsky, Darya Tsymbalyuk, Mona Vatamanu & Florin Tudor, Clemens von Wedemeyer / eeefff, Friedrich Bungert, Oleh Shpudeiko and Alexey Shmurak, Manfred Erjautz, Franz Kapfer, Vladislav Plisetskyi