Kyiv Biennial

No other contemporary art biennial in the institutional record has been programmed under the conditions the Kyiv Biennial has operated within since February 2022. The Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine reshaped every assumption that the international biennial form has rested on for the past sixty years: the assumption that the host city's institutional infrastructure will continue to function, the assumption that international participating artists can travel, the assumption that audiences can gather indoors in numbers without immediate risk to their physical safety, the assumption that the biennial can continue to exist as a continuing institutional programme rather than as a one-edition emergency response. The Visual Culture Research Center, organising the Kyiv Biennial across the post-February-2022 period, has had to make institutional decisions no European biennial of comparable scale has had to make in the post-1945 period.

The institutional choice the VCRC made — to continue programming the Kyiv Biennial as a continuing institutional argument, not to suspend operations until peacetime — is the most consequential editorial decision in the institution's history. The 5th edition (Against the Logic of War, 2023–24) extended the Biennial across eight European host cities — Kyiv, Vienna, Warsaw, Berlin, Lublin, Ivano-Frankivsk, Uzhhorod, Antwerp — programming a continuing pan-European argument that the Ukrainian contemporary art conversation belongs at the institutional centre of European contemporary art rather than at its periphery. The opening at the Dovzhenko Centre in Kyiv on 5 October 2023 was, by the consensus of the international art press, one of the most institutionally consequential biennial openings of the year.

The structural question the Kyiv Biennial's continuing operation has put to the international biennial circuit is whether the format the field has been organised around for the past three decades — large-scale international biennial as continuing institutional argument — can continue to operate when the political conditions of the host city deny the basic infrastructural assumptions on which the format rests. The VCRC's continuing institutional position is that it can, and that the cost of the alternative — accepting the Russian invasion as an institutional precedent for biennial suspension — would be a cost the contemporary art conversation cannot afford to pay. Whether the field will continue to support the VCRC's continuing operation at sustained institutional weight, across what is likely to be a continuing multi-year wartime condition, is the editorial question the next two biennial cycles will answer.

The institutional reception of Against the Logic of War across European art-press outlets has been substantial. Jason Farago's New York Times review of 3 November 2023, the Frieze, e-flux, and Artforum coverage across late 2023 and 2024, and the institutional adoption of VCRC's curatorial argument across major European biennials of 2024–25 (Manifesta 15's Barcelona programming, the Berlin Biennale's 13th edition under Zasha Colah and Valentina Viviani) have together established the Kyiv Biennial's continuing curatorial position as one of the most institutionally consequential continuing programmes in European contemporary art. That position will continue to be tested for as long as the war does.