KYIV.- Following the critically-charged, itinerant format of the 2023 edition, the 6th Kyiv Biennial will again take place in multiple locations across Europe. This year the Kyiv Biennial marks its 10th anniversary and is co-organised by L'Internationale, a European confederation of museums, art institutions and universities. The main exhibition, which will be held at the newly-opened Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, is curated by a consortium of curators from L'Internationale and will feature over ten new artists' commissions alongside works from the members' collections and a number of international loans.

Kyiv Biennial 2025 takes place in times of ongoing wars, occupations, ethnic cleansing and genocide, including Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Israel's brutal operation in Gaza and the broader fascist turn in global politics. In reckoning with the injustices and atrocities committed by the imperialisms and colonialisms of today, Kyiv Biennial 2025 reflects with historical consciousness on failed solidarities and internationalisms. It does this across what the curators name as Middle-East-Europe, a term encompassing Central Eastern Europe, the former-Soviet East and the Middle East.

Titled Near East, Far West, 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. It will embark on a perennial modus operandi as a collective, long-term endeavour on a pan-European scale. Organized by the Visual Culture Research Center, the Kyiv Biennial is an international forum for art, knowledge, and politics that integrates exhibitions and discussion platforms. Embedded in a wide horizontal network of cultural institutions, centres and artistic practices, the Kyiv Biennial aims to situate art and public programming amidst the current transformation of Europe and the world.