KYIV PERENNIAL: “a collective, long-term endeavor against the backdrop of survival”

BÉTON BLEU MAGAZINE x KYIV PERENNIAL

Kyiv Perennial is a continuation of the pan-European edition of the Kyiv Biennial 2023, emerging into the complex realities of war by showcasing trauma, displacement, the societal and political divisions in Europe and the decolonisation movements within Eastern European culture and politics. Béton Bleu Magazine spoke with the Artistic Director of Kyiv Perennial VASYL CHEREPANYN, about bringing truth to the forefront through artistic practice.

Béton Bleu: The last time we saw each other was November 2021 in Kyiv, a couple of months before the full-scale Russian invasion. How have you been?

Vasyl Cherepanyn: The 4th Kyiv Biennial edition in 2021 took place exactly a few months before the all-out Russian invasion of Ukraine. Right after it started, we at the Kyiv Biennial came up with the idea to launch the Emergency Support Initiative to help Ukrainian cultural practitioners, artists, and curators, first with some practical support in terms of everyday expenses and relocation. Shortly after, this idea of emergency support was institutionalised and run as a cooperative initiative from which several art emergency residences have risen. Regarding the Kyiv biennial itself, it became clear it wouldn't be possible to do it as before. So, we started approaching our foreign counterparts to turn the next edition into a really pan-European international event.

BB: What did that look like?

VC: We invited partners in line with our political approach so that this fifth edition would be based on genuine solidarity and joint commitment to bring urgent issues to the international audience. Politically, this has been crucial for us. The basic thing this biennial edition tries to convey is that the Ukrainian cause is an international one. It's actually absurd that one country is trapped in a war situation in which it has to fight for a European and international cause on its own. That's why it was very important to spread the biennial as much as possible.

BB: Which locations did you choose for this pan-European biennial setting?

VC: From fall 2023 till now, we’ve managed to cover quite a few countries. The biennial started in October 2023 in Kyiv, then it travelled to Ivano-Frankivsk and Uzhhorod in the west of Ukraine, then it went to Vienna, Warsaw, Antwerp, and Lublin, and this year, in 2024, it takes place in Berlin. All these cities had their own program, exhibition and set of events, their own message and narrative. It's a dispersed format that simultaneously works as a general framework encapsulating a wide range of topics that – despite different contexts – we are all facing at this moment, separately and collectively.

BB: There's a general fatigue in a lot of countries regarding support for Ukraine. At the same time, we have looming presidential elections in November 2024 in the U.S. that could dramatically change international support for Ukraine. Keeping all this in mind, what is the key message of the Berlin edition?

VC: The Berlin edition of the Kyiv Biennial is not by accident titled Kyiv Perennial. It points at something that lasts beyond bi-annual logic; it describes the ability to survive, go through, and overcome obstacles despite all odds. I believe this is perhaps the best characteristic of Ukraine over the last two years of war. Content- and form-wise, the most crucial notion the biennial tackles is the question of evidence and what it means today. How has it changed through the war, and how can we approach that? The majority of the artists we invited to contribute work on the intersection of research, investigative journalism, forensics, and documentary filmmaking. Most artworks are not just artworks but have a documentation nature; some were even initially conceived and made to be juridically valid and acceptable in a court hearing.

BB: Does this also underscore how the art space in Ukraine has changed and how artists are becoming activists and part of the defence effort?

VC: Some Ukrainian artists have joined the armed forces; others take part in the effort to bring the perpetrators to justice. The idea and form of the document can serve as a basis for truth in both a political and judicial sense. Pursuing the politics of truth, bringing truth to the forefront of culture and politics, is perhaps the only option in a time when we're facing fascist threats around the world. It's not only about the imagery the Kyiv Biennial presents, but the image also has to be accompanied by words and action. That's why we also have a program of debates, panel discussions, presentations, and a poster project trying to widen our impact on the context.

BB: You're creating a public dialogue across different art venues.

VC: Right, but apart from that, for us, it was very important in a city so crucial for today's Europe, such as Berlin, to go beyond the white cube gallery room and be present in the public space. Together with the curatorial team, particularly with Wolfgang Tillmans and the Between Bridges exhibition space, we came up with the idea of a poster project, for which we invited six artists to answer the question “What will happen to Europe if the war against Ukraine continues for ten more years?” Their posters have been fly-posted throughout the city and are also available at each biennial location in Berlin for visitors to take away. This trinity of being visually, discursively, and socially engaged was a conceptual basis for this edition.

BB: You mentioned the idea of artists becoming activists. How inevitable do you think it is that over the last two years, especially Ukrainian artists have become activists? Can art and activism coexist, or is it inevitably a mix of both?

VC: For Ukrainian artists, there has simply been no other way. However, looking at the tendencies in Ukrainian culture over the last years, this characteristic is quite unique. You can hardly find a similar example in any other country in Europe today, where culture and art act in constant reference to political developments and are profoundly interconnected with revolutionary events. This feature comes from the revolutionary experience of Ukrainian contemporary art, which emerged from different political upheavals that the artists and cultural workers took part in as citizens.

BB: How does this relationship between art and political activism express itself?

VC: This revolutionary experience covers at least the last 20 years and was urgently reactivated in February 2022. The cultural field in Ukraine has been very much characterised by the emergence of various types of art residences, joint initiatives, and artistic collectives – all those formations that might be called communal bodies, and this is reflected in the artistic production and perception. The idea of the collective is a primary form of building political power, which affects how artists operate, what they show and which media they choose. Many artists in Ukraine have deliberately switched to other media in the last two years as they felt a need to respond to the war situation and draw a distinction between their work before and after. Culture and art in Ukraine don't function as if they are some safe havens, they don’t provide any escape or break from the harsh reality around them. Quite the opposite, what’s represented, particularly within Kyiv Perennial in Berlin, goes into the heart of political darkness and tries to tackle it in a way that mass media often cannot. This requires huge courage from the artists’ side and is done out of necessity and awareness of art’s own agency. In this war, freedom of art and culture is at stake, and their very existence is being threatened.

BB: In the first year of the full-scale invasion, there was a general openness to art and culture from Ukraine. A lot of places in Berlin and other cities have shown Ukrainian artists and given them a platform. Do you see a certain fatigue today?

VC: We, as the Kyiv Biennial, are working to make Ukrainian art a permanent part of the international discourse and European cultural scene. Of course, it is very much appreciated that many cultural entities have shown solidarity and given a platform to Ukrainian artists, but pretty often, this has been a one-time action. With the Kyiv Biennial, we try to provide an overarching, lasting perspective. It shouldn't be only about the attention economy but rather about how to become an indispensable part of the pan-European realm. Otherwise, it can dissolve very quickly without having any real consequences. The attention economy of the Western cultural institutions is driven by media logic – tomorrow, there will be another war around the corner, and then another one. This creates a hierarchy that dictates what to prioritise, what war and which refugees are ‘fashionable‘ at a particular moment.

BB: How can you avoid being dependent on ‘political trends’ in the West?

VC: Having a longer period of conduct provides us with more space to convey our messages and be present on a constant institutional basis. That's why established institutional partnerships mean so much – not only to us. If you’re just hosted for a few weeks and then you are gone, you have nothing left. Treating partnership as inseparable for all involved is contrary to hollow rhetoric about inclusion, accepting others, etc. If you consider yourself part of one whole, you can’t just lose one part without losing everything. If one part of a framework falls away, you feel that it's missing.

BB: The art and the artists are an essential part of something bigger, of a continuous conversation.

VC: It is also an anti-colonial endeavour to overcome this dynamic of dependence on the West’s benevolent willingness to listen, to pay attention, etc. This kind of showing of solidarity exoticises a particular context. In truth, this context is not detached from you but something that is as much yours as it is mine.

BB: It is not just something happening somewhere else that we decide to pay attention to or not, but a conversation we have to internalise because it is not separate from what is happening in Western Europe.

VC: That is particularly true this year when literally half the world will vote in elections. If a crucial problem is deliberately pushed to the outside and compartmentalised, it will inevitably have more severe repercussions over time. It’s not a question of what you pay attention to. You have to create circumstances in which you wouldn't need to ‘pay attention’ because you’re part of it. If you try to externalise the problem and throw it out the door, it comes in through the window.

BB: Thank you so much for your time.

About: Vasyl Cherepanyn (*1980) is the Artistic Director of Kyiv Perennial. He holds a PhD in philosophy (aesthetics) and has been lecturing at University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), University of Helsinki, Free University of Berlin, Merz Akademie in Stuttgart, University of Vienna, Institute for Advanced Studies of the Political Critique in Warsaw, Greifswald University. He was also a visiting fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. He co-edited Guidebook of The Kyiv International (Medusa Books, 2018) and '68 NOW (Archive Books, 2019) and curated The European International (Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam) and Hybrid Peace (Stroom, The Hague) projects. VCRC is the organizer of the Kyiv Biennial (The School of Kyiv, 2015; The Kyiv International, 2017; Black Cloud, 2019; Allied, 2021) and a founding member of the East Europe Biennial Alliance.

Kyiv Perennial is 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.

Website: https://2023.kyivbiennial.org/eng/

Interview: THORSTEN SCHRÖDER
01/05/2024

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