Geta Br\u0103tescu\u2019s 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\u2014resembling a strange, round face with pursed mouth and cutout photographs of human eyes\u2014stays with you through the show. Since her works entered the biennial circuit around 2011, the Romanian artist\u2019s name has become a byword for the maxim \u201cthe personal is political,\u201d and this iconic work introduces a biennial that declares itself preoccupied with \u201chow we make meaning and experience belonging in times marked by war, uncertainty, and estrangement.\u201d<\/p>\n
Organized by the outgoing KW associate curator Sofie Krogh Christensen, this staging of the biennial absolves itself of responsibility to \u201cbreak the news\u201d 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\u2019s\u00a0Leak, 2024), the works on view comprise cerebral and stylized personal responses to collective upheaval and loss. Herein lie the show\u2019s blind spots and limitations, which prevail across Germany\u2019s state-funded cultural landscape.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Projected onto a gigantic screen that dominates KW\u2019s cavernous main hall, Lesia Vasylchenko\u2019s 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 \u201cdecades of sunrises\u201d is perpetually dawning; below it, Vasylchenko has montaged Ukrainian night skies from films made in the country between 1918 and 2025. Nearby, Lida Abdul\u2019s 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: \u201cIt doesn\u2019t matter that it doesn\u2019t fly,\u201d says one of the kids, \u201cas long as you think you are controlling it.\u201d<\/p>\n
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 \u201cMiddle-East-Europe.\u201d It is true, as the wall text points out, that these geographies harbor shared \u201chistories of dispute, coloniality, and imperialism,\u201d but this neologism fails to deliver on two fronts. First, \u201cMiddle East\u201d\u2014a much older but now regrettably rooted colonial term\u2014seems 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\u2014a discursive erosion that Piotr Piotrowski, the great historian of Central-East European art, has cautioned against.<\/p>\n
The most tightly woven and thought-provoking section, on KW\u2019s third floor, explores landscapes of un- or re-belonging. Neda Saeedi\u2019s Abyssal Zone (2026) takes its cue from the Soviet-era bronze statue personifying a motherland\u2019s grief for her fallen sons that stands in Berlin\u2019s Treptower Park. Saeedi\u2019s installation takes colored, fragmentary, and exquisitely translucent glass casts of Mutter Heimat\u2019s 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\u2014and caring about\u2014form.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Anna Zvyagintseva\u2019s The Order of Things (2015\u2013) 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cA Bird That Cannot Land\u201d 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\u2014as its tragic title implies\u2014the 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 \u201coccupations, ethnic cleansing, and genocide,\u201d particularly mentioning \u201cRussia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine [and] Israel\u2019s brutal operation in Gaza,\u201d the Berlin version is situated only \u201cin shifting political realities.\u201d Word choice is not the be-all and end-all of critique, but public discourse is shaped by what can be said.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s 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 \u201ca lyrical artwork on the loss of communities and land under settler colonialism and genocide\u201d) has not traveled to Berlin. Other Palestinian artists are present both in \u201cA Bird That Cannot Land\u201d 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\u2019s superb early \u201ckinetic paintings\u201d (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\u2019s \u201cConcert Week,\u201d did speak uncensored, to riotous applause, and called for \u201can end to all injustices\u201d in her native region via the most heartbreaking folk songs\u2014but her participation (and that of a couple of other performers who addressed Palestine in the present tense)\u00a0was limited to a single night.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The team behind \u201cA Bird That Cannot Land\u201d faced the formidable challenge of not offending the main sponsor of the exhibition, Beauftragter der Bundesregierung f\u00fcr 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\u2019s emphasis on interiority, and the obliqueness or fleetingness of deeply needed critique, brings to mind the \u201cinner emigration\u201d 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Geta Br\u0103tescu\u2019s The Traveler (1970) opens the Berlin iteration of the nomadic Kyiv Biennial (the final stop on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":616505,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[9108,186318,146,85,46,47],"class_list":["post-616504","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-biennials","tag-eastern-europe","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-middle-east"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/616504","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=616504"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/616504\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/616505"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=616504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=616504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=616504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}