5th Kyiv Biennial, “A Bird That Cannot Land”

Geta Brătescu’s The Traveler (1970) opens the Berlin iteration of the nomadic Kyiv Biennial (the final stop on its tour across several European venues). The wall-mounted sculpture—resembling a strange, round face with pursed mouth and cutout photographs of human eyes—stays with you through the show. Since her works entered the biennial circuit around 2011, the Romanian artist’s name has become a byword for the maxim “the personal is political,” and this iconic work introduces a biennial that declares itself preoccupied with “how we make meaning and experience belonging in times marked by war, uncertainty, and estrangement.”

Organized by the outgoing KW associate curator Sofie Krogh Christensen, this staging of the biennial absolves itself of responsibility to “break the news” of the horrors in Ukraine, Palestine, and beyond. Instead, it shifts its emphasis to experiences of living with and through cataclysmic ruptures in these geographies, onto the mundane aspects of daily experience that might become sources of inspiration, sustenance, and even survival. By filtering its politics through personal experience, the show can claim to engage with the state of the world without passing express comment upon its causes. With a few notable exceptions (including Hito Steyerl’s Leak, 2024), the works on view comprise cerebral and stylized personal responses to collective upheaval and loss. Herein lie the show’s blind spots and limitations, which prevail across Germany’s state-funded cultural landscape. 

Projected onto a gigantic screen that dominates KW’s cavernous main hall, Lesia Vasylchenko’s video collage Night Without Shadows and Light Without Rippling of Waves (2025) enlists the viewer in its search for auspicious omens. At the top of the screen, a sun composed of “decades of sunrises” is perpetually dawning; below it, Vasylchenko has montaged Ukrainian night skies from films made in the country between 1918 and 2025. Nearby, Lida Abdul’s sepia-tinted 16mm film In Transit (2008) shows Afghani children decorating the wreck of an airplane with cotton and pretending to fly it like a kite: “It doesn’t matter that it doesn’t fly,” says one of the kids, “as long as you think you are controlling it.”

In a well-intended attempt at transnational solidarity and empathy, the curators of the participating institutions have collapsed regions stretching from Eastern Europe to Southwest and Central Asia into what they describe, incongruously, as a “Middle-East-Europe.” It is true, as the wall text points out, that these geographies harbor shared “histories of dispute, coloniality, and imperialism,” but this neologism fails to deliver on two fronts. First, “Middle East”—a much older but now regrettably rooted colonial term—seems to be flattened de novo into a modifier for Europe. Secondly, the term dilutes the historically and regionally incommensurate experiences and understandings of colonial and imperial modernity—a discursive erosion that Piotr Piotrowski, the great historian of Central-East European art, has cautioned against.

The most tightly woven and thought-provoking section, on KW’s third floor, explores landscapes of un- or re-belonging. Neda Saeedi’s Abyssal Zone (2026) takes its cue from the Soviet-era bronze statue personifying a motherland’s grief for her fallen sons that stands in Berlin’s Treptower Park. Saeedi’s installation takes colored, fragmentary, and exquisitely translucent glass casts of Mutter Heimat’s body and arranges them on three units of metal wire scaffolding with pyramidal bases. De- and re-constructed in this manner, the monument elicits neither patriotic grief nor the indifference paid to it by many present-day Berlin residents. Grief becomes a personal matter of attention to—and caring about—form. 

Anna Zvyagintseva’s The Order of Things (2015–) translates her own archive of figurative line drawings from before the full-scale Russian invasion of her native Ukraine (a figure napping in nature, a bespectacled man reading a book) into welded iron wire. Several of the resulting three-dimensional images appear to have fallen from the wall, and rest on white rectangular mats below. The viewer must make a concerted effort, negotiating a mental horizontal-to-vertical flip, in order to restore the vanished details back to the wire reliefs. What remains on the wall is not unlike a shell of a memory, while the dislodged fragments coalesce into new, unexpected constellations. 

“A Bird That Cannot Land” is home to an impressive number of works that eloquently reflect on homelands and exile, memory and marginalia, the ravages of empires and time. But—as its tragic title implies—the exhibition takes refuge in abstraction. This is most obvious in the differing ways the exhibition has been framed at its different venues. While the Warsaw and Antwerp iterations refer, in their opening wall texts, to the fact that the exhibition takes place amid “occupations, ethnic cleansing, and genocide,” particularly mentioning “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine [and] Israel’s brutal operation in Gaza,” the Berlin version is situated only “in shifting political realities.”1 Word choice is not the be-all and end-all of critique, but public discourse is shaped by what can be said.

It’s notable that a work by the Palestinian artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, present in earlier iterations of the biennial (and described, in the Warsaw wall text, as “a lyrical artwork on the loss of communities and land under settler colonialism and genocide”) has not traveled to Berlin. Other Palestinian artists are present both in “A Bird That Cannot Land” and the accompanying live program, and should be under no obligation to comment on the atrocities being committed by Israel in Gaza. The most overtly political works, however, are historical. Take Land (1988), one of Samia Halaby’s superb early “kinetic paintings” (i.e. digital animations) on view, which multiplies a shape that is reminiscent of historic Palestine and subjects it to a flurry of colorful overlays and distortions. But Land cannot be expected to engage the complexities of the present moment: there is a distinct asymmetry in speaking about Palestine through a work from 1988 while the works on show by Ukrainian artists display much more recent responses to their personal and regional plights. Wafaa Saied, the Berlin-based Gazan singer who performed with her band as part of the Biennial’s “Concert Week,” did speak uncensored, to riotous applause, and called for “an end to all injustices” in her native region via the most heartbreaking folk songs—but her participation (and that of a couple of other performers who addressed Palestine in the present tense) was limited to a single night. 

The team behind “A Bird That Cannot Land” faced the formidable challenge of not offending the main sponsor of the exhibition, Beauftragter der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien (the German equivalent of a Ministry of Culture), while holding onto a progressive line of critique. Their attempt is commendable, but the show’s emphasis on interiority, and the obliqueness or fleetingness of deeply needed critique, brings to mind the “inner emigration” that many progressive, non-Jewish German intellectuals and artists undertook during the National Socialist regime by retreating from public life. In a democratic country ruled by law, where people once took pride in their Streitkultur (culture of debate), no one should be forced to walk such tightropes.