This is a continuation of Laboratories of Friendship, Part 3: Founders, Friends, and Snakes.
I mentioned to Kairat that I had come to Kazakhstan from Ukraine, via Uzbekistan. He said that he has many Ukrainian friends, that he worries about them and he hopes that the war will be over soon. He was even more careful than Smagulov, however, not to say anything explicitly anti-Russian on the record. When I asked him whether he would have any problems working with Ukrainian institutions, Kairat said that Tselinny is very open to all collaborations, and that in any case, programming decisions are made by the curatorial team, not by him, and added that “the role of art is to ask difficult questions, questions which we could not ask otherwise.” Indeed, Tselinny—unlike many other institutions in central Asia—has hosted talks by Ukrainian artists since the full-scale invasion, including Nikita Kadan, Nikolay Karabinovych, and Yevheniia Moliar. Its recent publications portfolio includes the book Three Essays on Eurasia (2024), penned by Tselinny board member Bart De Baere, former director of the M HKA in Antwerp and coordinator of the L’Internationale, a confederation of solidarity- and commons-oriented European contemporary arts institutions.
The book provides a revealing glimpse into the shifting worldview of a leftist Western European intellectual clearly fascinated by Russianness and Sovietness, from the rather roseate Russophilia of his mid-2010s essay on Troubetzkoy and leftist Eurasianism to the relatively ardent pro-Ukrainianness of his post-2022 text. The latter essay is illustrated by a watercolor drawing of turn-of-the-century Ukrainian socialist poet and feminist Lesya Ukrainka. The drawing is the work of David Chychkan, the anti-fascist and anarchist artist, activist, and soldier who was killed in the line of duty fighting against Russia on August 10, 2025.
Chychkan’s drawing, part of his “Ribbons and Triangles” (“Strychky ta Trykutnyky”) series (2020–), was purchased by M HKA and shown in “Imagine Ukraine—Art and Critical Attitude,” which opened in June 2022 and constituted the museum’s initial response to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It was shown again, following Chychkan’s death, in “Homelands and Hinterlands,” an exhibition at M HKA co-curated by Vasyl Cherepanyn and Nav Haq, and organized as part of the 2025 edition of the Kyiv Biennial. (A version of the work was also shown at DCCC in 2025.) The Antwerp exhibition was conceived by the biennial organizers as an extension of a larger show at MSN Warsaw, “Near East, Far West,” featuring Sky Above Almaty: Qandy Qańtar/BloodyJanuary (2022), a monumental, blood-red, twelve-meter-wide cellophane collage by Kazakh artist Saule Suleimenova depicting Almaty’s Respublika Alañy shortly before the bloody suppression of the January 2022 protests, which was acquired by Tselinny in 2025 and transferred to M HKA for shared custody and display.
Two other exhibitions were held in Ukraine-based institutions as part of the 2025 edition of the Kyiv Biennial: a show on Ukrainian poetic cinema at Kyiv’s Dovzhenko Centre—Ukraine’s major film archive and research center, whose building, archive, and budget have been threatened with liquidation for several years—and “Everything for Everybody,” an exhibition held at DCCC, and largely devoted to the collection of the Pokrovsk Historical Museum, which was evacuated from Pokrovsk to Dnipro during the Russian siege of the city in 2025.
There are threads—ribbons, triangles, and other irregular and zigzagging connections—running across these international, inter-, para-, and anti-institutional collaborations. Concerns at the core of the programs of many of the institutions (and geographies) considered in this essay were brought together under the auspices of the Kyiv Biennial. The biennial is, in turn, supported by the L’Internationale coalition, of which M KHA—currently under threat due to cackhanded managerial interventions proposed by the Flemish government—is a founding institution.1 MSN Warsaw and Kyiv’s Visual Culture Research Center (VCRC, co-founded by Vasyl Cherepanyn) are later joinees. Tselinny, ALMA, and DCCC are not (yet?) members; but could they be? Would they be invited? If not, why not?
Chychkan’s ribbons and triangles still connect many of the same people and groups that they used to, but, in Ukraine, they also point to new networks and places that have their roots in the post-Maidan period, and whose mission, aesthetic, ideology, and organizational forms respond to the present trauma of war and the immediate, encroaching proximity of the Russian neo-empire. Beyond Ukraine, each of the NDCBs considered function in the shimmer and shadow of the dependencies they are folded into and the bargains they have struck with so many different species of snakes, demons, puppeteers, and Friends. Each aspires to practice some iteration of criticality, radicality, or decoloniality. Some NCDBs, however, have chosen—or been forced by circumstance—to allow their bargains and dependencies to (over)determine their ideology, program, even the affect and atmosphere of their activities, and at times buildings). Others have taken different routes—of varying levels of precarious irreverence to the power vertical, and of committed, if sometimes cautious, cultivation of strings, triangles, or grids of alliance, solidarity, and resistance.
The circumstances in Warsaw, Dnipro, Tashkent, Bukhara, and Almaty are so starkly different that it is futile to aspire to a fair or meaningful comparison. Each of these places relates differently to the many guises adopted by the Russian Friend and to its lingering old and new presences. They all also possess different levels of proximity to, and autonomy from, the violence borne and new wounds generated by its tantrums. In each, the old empire lingers pervasively in the bricks, concrete panels, and decorative embellishments of the buildings themselves; in the physical fabric and atmosphere of the city; and (in most places) in the concerns raised by the artworks on display and curatorial agendas enacted therein.
What each of these institutions (and their respective buildings) have in common is that they have come into being during the moment of the Russian neo-empire’s irredentist awakening: a long, nightmarish hypnopompia, which, since the invasions of Ukraine in 2014 and 2022, has been in a condition of protracted apotheosis. We can hope that this apotheosis constitutes the death throe of “this fucking empire,” not to the birth of some fantasy “multipolar” world order in which it will play a starring villainous role.2 Cultural institutions positioned directly in the neo-empire’s line of fire have no choice but to try to hasten its demise, to resist its salvoes, and to care for its victims. Those positioned in the safer sections of the just-beyond are constrained by economic, political, and cultural conjunctures. Yet there is always room for maneuver in terms of how one positions oneself in relation to the neo-empire, its false philia, and its geometries of dominance.
Philippe Pirotte and Els Silvrants-Barclay, “The Fifth Estate: On Museums, Public Imagination and the Vanishing Space for Collectivity,” L’Internationale, December 18, 2025, ➝.
See Michał Murawski, “Laboratories of Friendship, Part 1: New Decolonial Culture Buildings Beyond the Russian Neo-Empire,” Positions (e-flux Architecture, March 2026), ➝.
