Kyiv Biennial 2023 - Vienna

Kyiv Biennial 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 thereforeformed the core of the project. Addressing the question of what true cultural-political solidarity with a war-torn country means, the exhibition aimed, 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. The fifth edition of the Kyiv Biennial took place across Europe at locations in Kyiv, IvanoFrankivsk, 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. Dispersed exhibitions and public programs in a number of Ukrainian and EU cities were realized in partnership with leading European institutions in the field of contemporary art.