Allied – Kyiv Biennial 2021

Allied – Kyiv Biennial 2021, curated by the East Europe Biennial Alliance, aimed to explore various historical forms and contemporary examples of cultural and political alliances in Eastern Europe and beyond and their ability to create new social formats. The biennial hosted a series of art projects and public program events focusing in particular on the current conditions, political factors, and institutional actors that foster new alliances in the twenty-first century. Kyiv Biennial 2021 brought together the curatorial approaches of partner institutions from Prague, Warsaw, Budapest, and Riga, establishing a model of an inter-institutional alliance for multilateral activity in the region as a sustainable network for collaboration and a space for support that is sorely missing in the field of politics today. The conceptual foundations of Allied – Kyiv Biennial 2021 related to the phenomena of (de)colonialism, authoritarianism, and the politics of memory in the conditions of post-socialist capitalism in Europe’s East. The biennial questioned the notion of (semi-)periphery and its traditional geopolitical and cultural divisions with metropoles from the perspective of the transnational history of Eastern Europe. 2021 edition provided the analysis of current authoritarian tendencies and interconnected with the study of an ideologically motivated memory politics, which determines the historical image of Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall, as well as with the latest revolutionary transformations and military conflicts that have redefined the post-Soviet space thirty years after the collapse of the USSR.