Kyiv Biennial 2023
L’Internationale Confederation is a proud partner of this year’s edition of Kyiv Biennial.
The fifth edition of the Kyiv Biennial will take place across Europe at locations in Kyiv, Ivano-Frankivsk, 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.
This Biennial edition is conceived as a European event, with dispersed exhibitions and public programs in a number of Ukrainian and EU cities, and realized in partnership with leading European institutions in the field of contemporary art.
The project aims to reintegrate the Ukrainian artistic community, divided by war and scattered across Europe, and to enable its actors to work together with international colleagues and partners on the cultural, social and environmental challenges Ukraine is currently facing and to place them in a global context. Artistic images, investigative documentations and institutional practices will be explored with regard to possible exit strategies from the current impasse of war, authoritarianism and colonialism, where the scenarios for a new Ukraine beyond war could even be imagined.
The decentralized European Kyiv Biennial will be an important and at the same time “introductory gesture” that creates bridges and pillars for a long-time relationship with Ukraine on a personal as well as institutional level, which will remain beyond the projects carried out in Autumn 2023.
Read more on the Kyiv Biennial website.
Related activities
The Soils Project
The Soils Project, is part of the eponymous, long term research initiative involving Tarrawara Museum of Art, Wurundjeri Country, Australia, the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, Netherlands and Struggles for Sovereignty, a collective based in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. It works through specific and situated practices that consider soil, as both metaphor and matter. A further iteration of the project will open at the Van Abbemuseum in May - September 2024 as part of Museum of the Commons.
The Soils Project has been in development since 2018. An international collaboration between three organisations, and several artists, curators, writers and activists, the project has manifested in various iterations over several years including a three-part public webinar series titled The Soils Project: groundwork, and a two-week workshop, titled The Soils Project: On Country, for participating curators and artists. With a curatorium comprising arts workers from TarraWarra Museum of Art, the Van Abbemuseum, and Struggles for Sovereignty, the project’s approach seeks and facilitates opportunities to listen to diverse voices and perspectives around notions of caring for land, soil and sovereign territories.
Developed from this journey, The Soils Project’s forthcoming exhibition will embrace the deep histories of each participant’s location, examining the multiplicity of landscapes and environments, and the impact of colonisations and global industries on cultural heritage, land management and traditional knowledges.
Kyiv Biennial 2023
L’Internationale Confederation is a proud partner of this year’s edition of Kyiv Biennial.
Where are the Oases?
PEI OBERT seminar
with Kader Attia, Elvira Dyangani Ose, Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz, Emily Jacir, Achille Mbembe, Sarah Nuttall and Françoise Vergès
An oasis is the potential for life in an adverse environment.
Anti-imperialism in the 20th century and anti-imperialism today: similarities and differences
PEI OBERT seminar
Lecture by Ramón Grosfoguel
In 1956, countries that were fighting colonialism by freeing themselves from both capitalism and communism dreamed of a third path, one that did not align with or bend to the politics dictated by Washington or Moscow. They held their first conference in Bandung, Indonesia.
Cinema as Assembly
Cinema as Assembly investigates cinema as a space of social gathering and political engagement that prefigures and enacts forms of living beyond colonial capitalism.
Maria Lugones Decolonial Summer School
Recalling Earth: Decoloniality and Demodernity
Course Directors: Prof. Walter Mignolo & Dr. Rolando Vázquez
Recalling Earth and learning worlds and worlds-making will be the topic of chapter 14th of the María Lugones Summer School that will take place at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven.
Archive of the Conceptual Art of Odesa in the 1980s
The research project turns to the beginning of 1980s, when conceptual art circle emerged in Odesa, Ukraine. Artists worked independently and in collaborations creating the first examples of performances, paradoxical objects and drawings.
Summer School: Our Many Easts
Our Many Easts summer school is organised by Moderna galerija in Ljubljana in partnership with ZRC SAZU (the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts) as part of the L’Internationale project Museum of the Commons.
Open Call – Summer School: Our Many Easts
Our Many Easts summer school takes place in Ljubljana 24–30 August and the application deadline is 15 March. Courses will be held in English and cover topics such as the legacy of the Eastern European avant-gardes, archives as tools of emancipation, the new “non-aligned” networks, art in times of conflict and war, ecology and the environment.
Song for Many Movements: Scenes of Collective Creation
An ephemeral experiment in which the ground floor of MACBA becomes a stage for encounters, conversations and shared listening.
Related contributions
…and the Earth along. Tales about the making, remaking and unmaking of the world.
The Kitchen, an Introduction to Subversive Film with Nick Aikens, Reem Shilleh and Mohanad Yaqubi
The Repressive Tendency within the European Public Sphere
Troubles with the East(s)
Right now, today, we must say that Palestine is the centre of the world
Body Counts, Balancing Acts and the Performativity of Statements
Until Liberation I: Learning Palestine
Until Liberation II: Learning Palestine
The Veil of Peace
Editorial: Towards Collective Study in Times of Emergency
Song for Many Movements. Opening Performance Live on Radio Alhara
We Have Been Here Forever. Palestinian Poets Write Back
Indra's Web
Diary of a Crossing
The Silence Has Been Unfolding For Too Long
