The Kyiv Biennial has always been a war biennial. Vasyl Cherepanyn, director and curator of the Ukrainian Visual Culture Research Center, underlined this on a pleasant June morning in the courtyard of KW Berlin. This is a fact that feels both significant and oddly detached at the same time, given its enormity and the unimaginable responsibility that comes with recognizing it. Can a biennial in exile be a useful tool of resilience? Can it help to expand common ground in a moment of interacting global crises?
Inaugurated the year after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, the Kyiv Biennial was pushed towards a nomadic existence after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In the intervening years, it took place in various European cities, including Warsaw and Antwerp. This year, it finds a temporary home at the former margarine factory in Mitte, which is now the KW. Once a ruin made by war and division, it was occupied and then transformed into an art space. Today it is a defining institution for Berlin’s cultural landscape and a fitting place for this year's iteration of the Kyiv Biennial titled “A Bird that Cannot Land”.
As a metaphor for exhaustion, suspension, and disorientation in the face of conflict, the title not only announces the Kyiv Biennial’s specific condition, but also that of the artists present. Continuing the previous edition’s curatorial concept of a “Middle-East-Europe”, this iteration brings together artists from various countries—from the UK in the West to Uzbekistan in the East—in an attempt to foster a unified understanding across individual experiences of oppression, displacement, and armed conflict.
The exhibition greets the visitor with Geta Brătescu’s enigmatic objet trouvé The Traveler (1970). It takes a moment to realize that the peculiar object that the artist has glued images of her eyes onto is a cane that can be unfolded into a chair. The work connects with the exhibition’s title, as Brătescu—who loved to travel and who kept a journal in the form of scrapbooks—considered traveling as a metaphor for a mental state. With its octopus-like feet, the surrealist face of Brătescu, with her slightly weary eyes and its evocative title, the work radiates strength and resilience and stands, above all, as a testament to an unbreakable imagination.
Geta Brătescu, The Traveler, 1970. Courtesy Collection of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. Installation view of the exhibition Kyiv Biennial – A Bird That Cannot Land at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 2026. Photo: Frank Sperling.
The context of its creation, under Romania’s socialist regime, only furthers its power: the eyes disappearing under the seat when the chair is unfolded, like they are temporarily ducking away from surveillance, to resume their travels when danger has passed.
In the next room, the visitor encounters another household object transformed into a multilayered, ambivalent work with Mona Hatoum’s Misbah (2006–07); its title is the Arabic word for “lantern”. Rotating in the center of the room, the titular lantern projects stars and men with rifles onto the surrounding walls, virtuosically connecting feelings of comfort, trauma, and looming doom. Born into a Palestinian family in Beirut, Lebanon, Hatoum moved to London in 1975 when the Lebanese Civil War broke out.
Hatoum and Brătescu’s works are worlds apart from each other aesthetically and geographically, yet they become more resonant in their proximity as the exhibition grasps their situated interconnectedness within the larger ideological and social betrayals that allowed for their respective displacement and oppression.
Heinali and Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko, Rewire Festival 2025; photo: Maurice Haak.
Such experiences, of course, are not exclusive to history. A feeling of interconnectedness was also palpable on the opening day of the Biennial’s concert week. The performance Гільдеґарда (Hildegard), a collaboration between the composer and sound artist Heinali and the vocalist Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko, opened up an interpretation of two compositions by the 12th-century Benedictine nun and mystic Hildegard von Bingen. Heinali’s at times delicate, at times dramatic, drone sounds and Saienko’s unique voice made for a heavenly, heartbreaking experience. Here again the context adds another layer of significance: Saienko’s singing draws from Ukrainian folk music, which was suppressed during the Soviet era[1] and which is now experiencing a rise in popularity as an act of resilience amidst Russia’s attempt to erase the country’s cultural heritage.[2]
Not all connections work so felicitously as those described above, however. That a work's inherent qualities and the context it originated from are not always in such harmony was exemplified by the second concert of the night, revealing a larger tendency in the project’s curation. Abdullah Miniawy’s The evens, Rahma, combined whistling, wind instruments, singing, and poetry. With its multiple elements, the performance opened up so many individual dimensions that it was difficult to perceive it as a coherent whole. This feeling of not finding a rhythm, of going in different directions rather than creating a single harmony, resonates throughout the Biennial’s curation. The exhibition’s third floor is especially reflective of this tendency.
Concert by Abdullah Miniawy. Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia © 2025. Credit: Andrea Avezzù.
For example, there the visitor encounters Aykan Safoğlu’s 1991 (2026), a partially-assembled puzzle showing a person riding a whale. It references the story of the beluga whale “Tichka”, which unfolded against the backdrop of the collapsing Soviet Union. Escaping his place of captivity in the Soviet Union twice, he ended up both times in the same Turkish seaside town, sparking media and political turmoil.
Aykan Safoğlu, 1991, 2026. Courtesy the artist. Installation view of the exhibition Kyiv Biennial – A Bird That Cannot Land at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 2026. Photo: Frank Sperling.
On the same floor, Anna Zvyagintseva’s series The Order of Things (2015-) deals with the collapse of order following the beginning of Russia’s invasion in 2014. Everyday scenes are illustrated in the form of incomplete drawings made from wire attached to the wall; their missing parts are arrayed on the floor in front of the works.
In the middle of the same room, Neda Saeedi presents her take on Mutter Heimat, the statue that forms part of Berlin’s Soviet War Memorial at Treptower Park. Her work, Abyssal Zone (2026), shows fragments of the monument molded in colored glass.
Anna Zvyagintseva, The Order of Things (2015-). Foto Frank Sperling. KW, Kyiv Biennial.
Neda Saeedi, Abyssal Zone (2026). Foto Frank Sperling. KW, Kyiv Biennial.
While these artists and their artworks are important voices to better understand the underlying conflicts, why do they feel dissonant in this context?
As highly literal metaphors for rootlessness, displacement, and disorientation, what is most present in these works is the portrayal of a collapsing order. What feelings arise under such circumstances? What unites the artists in their shared experience of collapsing orders? What might be coping mechanisms in such situations? Answers remain opaque. Positions that might be evident throughout the respective artists’ oeuvres do not become evident in the combination of the individual works on view.
In the arrangement at KW, they rather compete to tell their part of the story than to function as pieces of a puzzle highlighting a common experience. The three works described above come to take on the aura of token props, included to represent yet another conflict. Their narratives, however, are too closed off to contribute to a broader curatorial narrative.
Hito Steyerl & Philipp Goll, Trassniki, 2026. Courtesy the artists. Installation view of the exhibition Kyiv Biennial – A Bird That Cannot Land at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 2026. Photo: Frank Sperling.
This same pitfall in favoring content over carving out a clear storyline is also present on the exhibition’s first floor, albeit in a different form. The display comprises a trio of video installations including Hito Steyerl’s THE LEAK (2024), investigating the political history of gas pipelines connecting Russia and Germany, as well as Steyerl and Philipp Goll’s video Trassniki (2026), featuring interviews with workers involved in the building of the pipelines and their surrounding infrastructure, and Oleksiy Radynski’s Where Russia Ends (2024), an essayistic documentary diving into Russia’s imperialist past by exploring its exploitation of Indigenous people across Siberia and the Far North.
These fact-heavy works are important contributions to a dissection of the Soviet Union and Russia’s imperialist practices, but without further contextualization, they are simultaneously too complex and content-driven to elicit an intuitive response, as well as being too aestheticized in their execution to really educate the viewer. A discrete exhibition on the topic—featuring a diversity of works and substantive contextualisation—would be able to resolve this tension and to unpack its significance, but in the context of this exhibition, the works represent loose threads rather than fils rouges of a unified narrative.
A further example of the curation’s unfortunate tendency of including conflicts to “tick boxes” without providing them the space and context they require was Anne Ehrenstein and Yara Mekawei’s performance lecture The Cloud Is Still Balkanized. Its first part, touching on Ehrenstein’s Albanian heritage and the country’s difficult path to joining the EU, made great use of humor to expose the EU’s moral double standards. The second part, a meditation guided by Ehrenstein and accompanied by ambient music mixed by Mekawei, touched on a wide array of issues from “technocratic white supremacy” to giving back colonized land, and asserted that “modernity was not built by invention but erasure”. Such topics would fit easily into the Biennial’s discursive program, but they demand proper attention—not simply to be name-dropped in a darkened room filled with ambient music and half-asleep participants.
In many ways, this performance reflected a kind of counter-theme running through the entire project: content being stacked without the necessary effort being made to unpack it, not giving the works the care and attention needed to truly engage with them.
In today’s circumstances of war, the Kyiv Biennial finds itself again in the international spotlight. The approach adopted, to use this attention not only to shed light on Ukraine's suffering, but to further discourse on a larger geopoliticized region, reflects an honorable solidarity and it also represents a powerful opportunity. Its execution, unfortunately, does not measure up to the demands of the task. “A Bird that Cannot Land” feels like a project that is conscious of its responsibility but unable to cope with the pressure that it generates, trying to play it safe by including as many perspectives as possible and in doing so losing any sense of a clear vision. What remains is the bleak reassurance that we live in a world of crisis and suffering. The potential of opening up a new, shared perspective, however, never coheres.
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- Footnotes
[1] Maria Sonevytsky, “Гільдеґарда (Hildegard), Heinali / Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko,” Pitchfork, June 3, 2025, https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/heinali-andriana-yaroslava-saienko-gildegarda/
[2] Constant Méheut and Daria Mitiuk, “As Ukraine Rebuilds Its Identity, Folk Songs Are the New Cool,” New York Times, June 5, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/05/arts/music/ukraine-folk-music.html
Cover Image
Mona Hatoum, Misbah, 2006-07. Foto: Marc Domage. KW, Kyiv Biennial.
