Black Cloud – Kyiv Biennial 2019

The third edition of an experimental biennial forum for art, knowledge and politics, Black Cloud – Kyiv Biennial 2019 brought together artists, academics and activists to develop a consistent understanding of the last three decades in the history of Eastern Europe, largely defined by the Chernobyl disaster of 1986, the subsequent collapse of the Soviet bloc, and the emergence of a unipolar global regime of governance equipped with a new technological arsenal. The 3rd edition focused on surveillance and privacy in the web, digital forms of warfare, artificial intelligence and its political and civic implications. The Black Cloud exhibition curated by Serge Klymko within the Kyiv Biennial 2019 offered a reflection on contemporary information technologies and their cultural, political and ecological implications. The exhibition took place at the Scientific Library of the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute, one of the largest hubs for technological knowledge production in Ukraine. The exhibition functioned as a plane of intersection of the global cloud of digital data, radioactive plume of Chernobyl, environmental crisis and the political cloud shaped by the illusion of transparency in the post-ideological state. It is a volatile cloud of invisible factors that moulds our perception. The exhibition outlined an emergency state in environmental, technological and informational dimensions from the end of the 20th – beginning of the 21st century to post-human condition: the transcendence of a classical human and the prosthetic enhancement of the imperfection of homo sapiens.