Kyiv Biennial 2025: Near East, Far West

Near East, Far West will present not only new works commissioned especially for this show, but also numerous works from European museum collections. The exhibition opening on October 3, 2025 is part of the 6th edition of the Kyiv Biennial, and was prepared thanks to extensive international cooperation. In light of the war underway in Ukraine, the biennial is being staged not only in Ukraine, but also in Warsaw, Antwerp and Linz. The presentation at MSN Warsaw is the main exhibition of the Kyiv Biennial 2025. 

Near East, Far West—Kyiv Biennial 2025 is the fruit of cooperation by the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw within L’Internationale, a European confederation of museums, art organizations and universities. The show was prepared by an international team of curators, enabling the exhibition to include numerous complementary perspectives. The exhibition traces the interrelated histories within the region which the curators call “Middle-East-Europe”—a territory including Central & Eastern Europe, post-Soviet Central Asia, and the Middle East.

The galleries at MSN Warsaw will be filled by works by artists for whom the violence of war is a defining context and overarching horizon. Visitors will see the Platinum Collection of Ukrainian avant-garde art from the Mystetskyi Arsenal in Kyiv, currently stored at the museum in Warsaw. There will also be loans from the collections of member institutions of L’Internationale. The show will feature seven new works commissioned especially for the Kyiv Biennial and created thanks to the support of RIBBON International, a not-for-profit platform supporting historic and contemporary Ukrainian arts and culture in the form of exhibitions, artist commissions, public programs and grants. The new works arose with a view to the current social and political context, in the shadow of the war in Ukraine, genocide in Gaza, and the broader fascist turn in global politics. The artists whose works are shown include such names as Dana Kavelina, Tolia Astakhishvili, Nikita Kadan, Lesia Vasylchenko, Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Saule Suleimenova, Majd Abdel Hamid, Hito Steyerl, Ali Cherri, and Oraib Toukan.

The exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw will be extended to M HKA – Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp. These two parallel presentations focus on past and present experiences of colonial violence, erasure and genocide in Middle-East-Europe, where different forms of imperial oppression continue to be endured. These geographies have witnessed compelling stories of liberatory struggle that appear to be in retreat today, making their tracing and reconstitution in the face of renewed violence an urgent task. The assembly of art works in the exhibitions lays out a matrix of ongoing and historical violence, remembers vital – if ultimately failed – emancipatory efforts, and prompts consideration on how such efforts might begin again.

The iterations in Warsaw and Antwerp will be followed by two projects in Ukraine. Everything for Everybody at the Dnipro Center for Contemporary Culture is a documentary exhibition that engages archives from the collapse of the Soviet Union in the context of today's attempted recolonisation and neoliberal reimposition. It draws on photographic archives held by the Pokrovsk Local History Museum that were displaced from the city in 2024 as it was being destroyed by Russian bombs. The participating artists and researchers ask how to document and remember vanished and erased places, what politics inform this documentation, and how archives speak to each other across time and space.

The Dovzhenko Centre in Kyiv will host a historical research exhibition of Ukrainian poetic cinema. Titled In a Grandiose Sundance, in a Cosmic Clatter of Torture, the project deconstructs the language and historical meanings of this cultural movement, recognised as part of the 20th-century cinematic canon. By blending Carpathian landscapes and folklore with post-World War II traumas and existentialism, Ukrainian poetic cinema crafted an uncanny, idyllic, and tragic cinematic space. Politically, poetic cinema inadvertently coupled 'Ukrainian national' and 'anti-Soviet' motifs, creating audiovisual codes that Soviet state censorship could neither prevent nor appropriate.

The last of the exhibitions to open as part of the Kyiv Biennial in 2025 will be Vertical Horizon at the Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz. The exhibition considers land and landscape as poetic and political actors, their technological perception and exploitation, how they are affected by warfare and their visual and artistic representations. Highlighting a shift from geopolitics and war that unfold on the Earth's surface to that which takes place vertically, at the geological level, it traces the evolution of landscape as a basis of territorial identity through the marking of borders and possessions, to armed extractivism by both national and transnational agents of power.

The 6th edition of the Kyiv Biennial will extend into 2026 with exhibitions and public programmes across international venues.

Artists featured in the exhibition in Warsaw
Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Kateryna Aliinyk, Tolia Astakhishvili, Ali Cherri, Lana Čmajčanin, Barış Doğrusöz, Navine G. Dossos, Assaf Gruber, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Majd Abdel Hamid, Nikita Kadan, Dana Kavelina, Marina Naprushkina, İz Öztat & Zişan, Bojana Piškur, Oleksiy Radynski & Philipp Goll, Koka Ramishvili, Aykan Safoğlu, Hito Steyerl, Saule Suleimenova, Oraib Toukan, Lesia Vasylchenko, Artur Żmijewski.

Artists whose works are on loan from the Mystetskyi Arsenal in Kyiv
Oleksandr Bohomazov, Mykhailo Boychuk, Tymofiy Boychuk, Volodymyr Burliuk, Pavlo Gorily, Oleksandr Khvostenko-Khvostov, Kazymir Malevych, Vadym Meller, Solomon Nikritin, Viktor Palmov, Oksana Pavlenko, Anatol Petrytskyi, Mariia Syniakova, Vasyl Yermylov, unknown artist (Kazymyr Malevych?), unknown artist from the school of Mykhailo Boychuk. 

Curators
Nick Aikens (HDK-Valand), Vasyl Cherepanyn (Visual Culture Research Center), Zippora Elders (Van Abbemuseum), Charles Esche (L’Internationale Association), Nav Haq (M HKA), Serge Klymko (Visual Culture Research Center), Magda Lipska (MSN)