Kyiv Perennial

The Kyiv Perennial project, conceived by the Visual Culture Research Center (VCRC), the institutional organizer of the Kyiv Biennial, together with nGbK, Between Bridges, and Prater Galerie in Berlin in 2024, was a follow-up to the pan-European edition of the 2023 Kyiv Biennial with dispersed exhibitions and public programs in a number of Ukrainian and EU cities. Kyiv Perennial’s strategy was based on approaches that merge artistic production, critical knowledge, and social engagement in a state of emergency, and defined by the struggles that Ukrainian society is engaged in while fighting against Russia’s fascist invasion and a neo-colonial war of extermination and extraction. The experience of artists and cultural workers in Ukraine today is profoundly marked by war trauma, displacement, the lack of access to basic resources, and, in many cases, life under military occupation, or direct involvement in armed resistance. This poses existential challenges to the future of art and cultural production in the country, since its institutional infrastructure has been undergoing physical erasure. Kyiv Perennial tackles the multifaceted realities of war and its impact on the Eastern European region by addressing the destruction of nature due to military hostilities, ecologies of survival, the fate of historical and modern architectural heritage, and the psycho-political devastation endured on a mass scale. The visual and discursive programs also covered decolonial turn in contemporary culture and politics in Eastern Europe, merging artistic positions and research into war trauma, refuge, and new forms of cooperation in the region.