Despite losing its main venue four months before opening and tough funding conditions, this year’s edition of the Kiev biennial, called The School of Kiev, was unveiled to the public on 8 September (until 1 November). Opening events included talks by high-profile academics such as the Yale historian Timothy Snyder and exhibitions of works by artists including Neïl Beloufa, Pawel Althamer and Harun Farocki. We speak to Vasyl Cherepanyn, the head of Kiev’s Visual Culture Research Center and the institutional organiser of the event, about what it means to be an artist in Ukraine after the Maidan revolution of 2013-14.
How is the biennial going?
We managed to launch the biennial on 8 September, which is really quite huge. Apart from the 18 locations across Kiev we also have outposts in 15 venues outside of Ukraine, mostly in Western Europe, including Leipzig, Karlsruhe, Vienna, Trondheim, Amsterdam, Athens, Rome and Prague.
The biennial turned out so much better than we expected. We really had quite a difficult task to undertake when Mystetskyi Arsenal withdrew its participation in late March. We decided to go ahead but only had around four months to reinvent the concept, find new venues and raise funds. On the Eastern European and post-Soviet scale, this biennial is almost unprecedented. It is completely self-organised with no state funding. In four months we accomplished a task that usually takes two years. It was really a political action that we managed to get this off the ground.
Have you faced any obstacles from the government?
The biggest problem is that the state of Ukraine is not interested in such events. We addressed various ministries and local administrations, but the biggest support they have provided is an official letter saying they are happy the biennial will take place. This is just a paper; it’s not a real help. Maybe on some metaphysical level it works but in reality we’re here on our own. So it’s a grass-roots biennial, and every challenge we face we have to solve on our own.
Compared with other biennials, where panels and discussions are a sideline, at yours they seem to be the main event. Are talks the focal point?
The biennial is an educational project at heart. Our initial idea was that we need more knowledge than art. We didn’t want to stage a biennial that acts like an art market where famous curators and fashionable artists come and show themselves. We are interested in the process of studying; that’s why all participants are somehow engaged in an educational way. The works of art are not just there to illustrate the ideas we are discussing but to provide their own narrative of the problems we are tackling. So it’s very multi-dimensional.
A major achievement of the biennial is that it has breathed new life into institutions that are generally perceived as obsolete. We have inherited a cultural infrastructure from our Soviet past, which has been on the margins of contemporary artistic production. Like the House of Artists, the National Academy of Arts, the Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture, the Museum of the History of Ukraine and so on, all these institutions are remnants of an old regime. But through the biennial, we have managed to involve these institutions and make them join forces with new NGOs, volunteer networks, self-organised social centres, which appeared either during the Maidan uprising or as a response to the Russian-waged war on Ukrainian territories thereafter.
What is it like to be an artist in Ukraine today?
I think it has changed significantly in the past few years. Before the Maidan revolution we had the extremely conservative and corrupt party of Viktor Yanukovych on the one hand, and the far-right, or new fascist Svoboda party in opposition, on the other. Our institution [Visual Culture Research Center] was attacked several times in that period because of our events and exhibitions. Three years ago, our show Ukrainian Body was censored and we were kicked out of our premises in the University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy.
After Maidan, attitudes towards art changed and became more open. I was, however, attacked by neo-fascists last year but in general they are a small group that doesn’t dominate political discourse. While Maidan has been the best antidote against fascists, the war has unfortunately brought them back. It’s become a very convenient situation for both our enemies, I would say. The Kremlin uses the media image of the Ukrainian far right for its own benefit, while local neo-fascists are using Russian aggression and occupation of Ukrainian territories to legitimise their violence.
As for artists, I think that content-wise the agenda has changed. Before the revolution, artists rarely worked on political topics; it was rather the exception. But now it’s rather hard not to be politically engaged. That’s why most exhibitions that appeared after Maidan in Ukraine and abroad were connected and dedicated to politics. It has become a new trend, a new mainstream that unfortunately also produces a lot of kitsch.
Our biggest challenge in the artistic field is that two institutions largely dominate the cultural infrastructure: Mystetskyi Arsenal and the PinchukArtCentre. So there is a big problem—even in Kiev—to find a space for critical artistic thought where artists exhibit and discuss on a public level. Most Ukrainian critical artists can either be exhibited at the Pinchuk or abroad. The biennial is an instrument that could change this status quo.
For more see: http://politicalcritique.org/culture/2015/declaration-of-the-school-of-kyiv-kyiv-biennial-2015/