The second Kiev Biennial, which was postponed because of the conflict in eastern Ukraine and threatened with cancellation after its main venue pulled its support, will go ahead despite these setback, the curators have announced. Keeping the title “The School of Kyiv”, the contemporary art exhibition is due to open on 8 September and run until 1 November. It will be hosted by the Visual Culture Research Center, a space that has been targeted in the past by right-wing activists.
Originally scheduled to open in 2014 at the Mystetskyi Arsenal, the vast former armory where the first biennial took place, the second edition was postponed because of the tumult across Ukraine that followed the Euromaidan revolution. The Arsenal’s general director Nataliia Zabolotna, who organised the first Kiev Biennale, told The Art Newspaper that it was not a feasible or appropriate to hold the event again in a time of war. Zabolotna also told Ukrainian media that the curators had unrealistic financial expectations.“We tried every which way to bring them down to earth,” she told Novoye Vremya magazine.
Although they were surprised by the Arsenal pulling its support, the organisers of the second biennial, the Austrian curators and writers Georg Schöllhammer and Hedwig Saxenhuber, said they would carry on with the exhibition and held a press conference on 17 April at the Ukrainian Crisis Media Center to announce the details. The curators said the biennial would serve as both a way to inform an international audience about Ukraine’s early 20th-century avant-garde—with events to be held at institutions around Europe—and as a platform for contemporary political, social and cultural debate.
The Maidan revolution “spoke loudly about what the people of the Ukraine want to get rid of” and can serve as an example to Europe, Schollhammer said in an interview with the online television station Hromadske.“I think we have to follow that.”
In a press release, the organisers added that a number of institutions, non-governmental organisations and independent activists in Kiev and around Europe have stepped in to support the biennial, including Ukraine’s National Art Museum and National Academy of Arts, the Pinchuk Art Centre, the Athens Biennial, the Berlin University of the Arts, Leipzig University, the Badischer Kunstverein in Karlsruhe, Austria’s Erste Foundation, the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, Warsaw’s Museum of Modern Art, the British Council, and the Goethe-Institut.
