The Emigrant Biennial

What is the role of art critique during wartime? What is its proper place when I, a member of the audience, observe pieces reflecting the conditions on the front lines or in cities in range of Russian missiles? Perhaps the central objective of the exhibitions held under the auspices of the Kyiv Biennial is to allow Ukrainian artists scattered across Europe to come together and meet, share their experiences of exile, their fears, their hopes. Should I, as a critic working from the comfort of her central-European home, then have the right to scrutinize such an art show, compare it against the criteria of its institutional context, and question to what degree it updates the standards and discourses of contemporary art? Or should I, in light of the present situation, rather revise those very standards?

The Kyiv Biennial’s main exhibition is held in the former studio spaces of the Vienna Augarten, but this is just the tip of the overall exhibition. Other parts of the Biennial are installed in Antwerp, Lublin, Warsaw, Uzhhorod, Ivano-Frankivsk, and, of course, Kyiv. Vienna itself is host to nine various exhibition spaces. It is an exceptionally ambitious project. One cannot assume to visit and see all these spaces, so their image (and the reviews) will always remain partial. But seeing everything is not the goal here. The fact that the form of the Kyiv Biennial provides a view onto the experience of migration and the departure from places no longer safe on account of war is much more important, opening a space for continuing discussion as to what the last year may mean not only for the central and eastern regions but for all of Europe.

This was certainly the case of the small, independent space called Never At Home, found just north of downtown Vienna, where the current state of war intersects with the experiences of queer bodies or those marginalized on account of their skin color (Abdul Sharif Oluwafemi Baruwa) and social standing (Kolektiv Prádelna). Perhaps this small group exhibition offers an overtly straightforward reading, for example featuring the video by Anna Daučíková in which she and an artist from Jakarta thematize non-verbal communication presented by non-binary persons, or the large-format photographs of Anton Shebetko entitled We Were Here which commemorate the victims and actions of LGBTQI+ people who are fighting on the front and who often remain unacknowledged by the wider Ukrainian society. But on the other hand, the thematic affinity between the presented works helps the visitors grab hold of a single curatorial train of thought, although this approach has generally not been favored by the biennial format.

The back space of the Never At Home venue shows another important video, using simple forms to mediate a sense of uncertainty and suspicion, because understanding is, after all, also determined by the social conditions in which a person finds themselves. The short video entitled The Yellow Is Black by Kolektiv Prádelna was made this year and, much like their previous videos, is based on interviews with women who have experienced homelessness. Through their works, the artists continually reflect how contemporary art expresses the themes of poverty, but the collective also fosters a support structure within which the women can publicly express their perspective. The video follows the collective riding in a van, and the interview caught on a hand-held camera revolves around the question of which media and type of journalism the women follow and which type of information was important to them when they were living on the street.

In contrast to the Never At Home space, the Augarten studios offer a very classical and elegantly installed exhibition keeping with international standards (although, much like in the spaces of the Neuer Kunstverein Wien, there was a lack of heating and one had to think of the freezing custodians walking among the art works). Perhaps the most interesting piece on view at the main exhibition is the installation by the DE NE DE artist initiative, which presents documentation of various attempts to save the cultural legacy of the Soviet era, its demise stemming partly from the process of decommunization as well as the present war. For example, it presents the architecture of the city of Nova Kakhovka, monumental Ukrainian mosaics, the research of Semen Shyrochyn, the popularizer of Ukrainian modernist architecture, and other smaller projects, notably the documentation of village stores built during the era of the Soviet Union. These predominantly documentary-historical moments overlap with some of the installations of contemporary art – for example the Bucharest-based duo comprising Mona Vătămanu and Florin Tudor who brought to Vienna textiles which used to drape the walls of Ceaușescu’s famous palace and on which we can see the dust prints of the wooden paneling which for decades bore witness to the harsh Romanian dictatorship.

Formally, the exhibition oscillates between a dry, documentary-style approach and a contemporary post-digital morphology expressed in simple sculptural installations. The former can be seen in Friedrich Bungert’s photographic series of wounded Ukrainian soldiers or Tomáš Kajánek’s brilliantly chilling video-observation of a training experience for American tourists in the spaces of an Israeli military base, which has them learning to shoot at figurines imaged as “Palestinian terrorists.” In contrast to these, we see installations reminiscent of various archeological places exploring the residues of modernism (e.g., the Brussels-based mountaincutters art duo). As if it were impossible to access reality by means other than direct observation (news reports, documentaries, quasi-objective analyses) or through the experience of historical memory and loss.

So what about the institutional context?

However, if I am not merely to describe the pieces exhibited at the Kyiv Biennial, I must return to the question of the very possibility of critique posed in the introduction. Walking through the main exhibition, I was constantly hounded by two dissonant thoughts: the first revolved around the exhibited works, which offer the central European audience a gritty reflection on the last nine years of war in eastern Ukraine. The war has become an everyday part of our media sphere, as much as Ukrainian migrants have become part of the Czech public sphere. We’ve gotten used to it. But war should not be at all normal, it ought to be an anomaly that jolts us from our everyday lives.

This may also constitute the main curatorial concept as conceived by Ukrainian curator Serge Klymko and Austrian curators and critics Hedwig Saxenhuber and Georg Schöllhammer (Georg also serves as the director of the Viennese branch of tranzit). But because the exhibition and the accompanying brochure do not feature any text, the audience is made to primarily reflect on the individual works that in various ways narrate contemporary and recent wars, the socialist cultural legacy, or the battles waged by human bodies that do not conform to the norms of the majority society.

But the second thought that surfaced throughout was “Why Vienna?” The Kyiv Biennial has its particular history, being created as a space for international discussion and solidarity in an environment which is otherwise often hostile to progressive and critical leftist ideas (curator Vasyl Cherepanyn was assaulted in 2014, and three years later, an exhibition by the Visual Culture Research Center – VCRC was damaged). And it is the VCRC which organizes the Kyiv Biennial and which later became the founding member of the East Europe Biennial Alliance, which also includes Prague’s Matter of Art exhibition. Along with biennial showcases in Prague, Warsaw, Budapest, and Riga, the Kyiv Biennial connects a geographically specific region coping with the experience of Soviet influence as well as the current populist politics of virulent conservatism and nationalism.

But reflections on such a position are wholly absent from the Vienna exhibition, and so this regional affinity takes place exclusively at the economic-institutional level. Apart from Ukrainian and international names selected by the curatorial trio, the Biennial presents artists from eastern Europe recommended by curators of the tranzit network: Tereza Stejskalová (Prague), Judit Angel (Bratislava), Attila Tordai-S. (Cluj) and Dóra Hegyi (Budapest). ERSTE Stiftung, the founder of the tranzit network, is among the Kyiv Biennial’s main sponsors. Without the ERSTE Foundation and its decision that the Biennial would be organized in the record time of 6 months (largely thanks to the tranzit network), this year’s event would most likely not have taken place.

For the ERSTE foundation, which is celebrating its 20th year of operation this year, organizing such an event is an important source of symbolic capital that in turn supports the financial capital of the Erste Group Bank AG financial group, which is active in central and eastern Europe. Tranzit in this way adopts the bank’s activities as its own, as does the Kontakt collection, which is among the largest private collections of central and eastern European art from 1960 until today.

That is also a context which is very important for the Kyiv Biennial, but one which stays quietly out of sight. “There is an elephant in the room,” proclaims a large neon installation by Danish art group Superflex exhibited in Augarten. And while some cultural media outlets propose to understand this English idiom as alluding to the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine, perhaps the elephant could also be the question of why cultural and financial capital again remains in the metropolis of the center, on which the semi-periphery and periphery continue to rely.

I understand that the current situation makes it a wholly pragmatic decision, that the ERSTE Foundation’s offer helped establish the exhibition and, most importantly, support the artists themselves. Hopefully, part of such support also made it to the smaller towns where the biennial has taken place and where smaller exhibition spaces constitute an important part of the local art community. But the decision to organize the main exhibition in Vienna begs our attention and merits some important discussion, particularly in the region of central and eastern Europe.

5. Kyiv Biennial 2023 / main exhibition curators: Serge Klymko, Hedwig Saxenhuber and Georg Schöllhammer / Augarten Contemporary / Vienna / 18 November – 17 December 2023 / other Biennial locations: Kyiv (Dovzhenko Centre), Ivano-Frankivsk (Asortymentna Kimnata), Uzhhorod (Sorry No Rooms Available), Warsaw (Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw), Lublin (Galeria Labirynt), Antwerp (Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp)

Cover photo: Tomáš Kajánek, Shooting Adventure, 2021, HD video

Photo: eSeL.at – Joanna Pianka, Sasha Kovalenko