IT IS AN IMMEMORIAL HABIT of people that they tend to forget: the exact date, to check the back seat of an Uber before getting out, to have their keys on them when they leave the house, to bring water, pack a phone-charger, sunscreen, that Russia has perpetrated belligerent warfare inside Ukraine’s sovereign territory for over a decade, that it has launched a full-scale invasion dating back two years, that documenting chronology matters to conflict, that by any measure of reason and justice, responsible are those who started it. Provocation is subjective; a physical attack is not. Grasping material violence doesn’t always pair well with the realm of abstract ideas and theoretical pastiche.
A second staging of the Kyiv Biennial’s fifth edition, installed in four separate Berlin outposts, showcases timeless features of enacted warfare, its immediacy and irreversible consequences. Many of the works on display enact a language of documentary evidence, aiming to bring the conflict’s reality closer to Europe’s political center and circumvent the looming danger of an emotional dissociation deterring the West from continuing to identify with Ukraine. US commitment to aiding the war effort was no longer a bipartisan guarantee; European public opinion doesn’t believe all of the country’s former territory can be regained; “fatigue” is a medially recurring term. Similar to past responses concerning Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, pleas for a settlement ignore the fact that when you hand a fascist, expansionist regime part of your territory, it doesn’t just “stop there.” At nGbK near Alexanderplatz, a series of chilling video works produced collaboratively by various international and Ukrainian reporters, researchers, and writers is screened under the name The Reckoning Project: Ukraine Testifies (2022–23)—a formulation that could really serve as a watchword for the rest of the show. War crimes, abuses, and mistreatments are alleged in a pre-internet Cossack tone of unembellished sincerity; no buzzwords, just experiences—medical staff, teachers, housewives, farmers all trying to make sense of yesterday’s traumas while confessing them. Aiming to disseminate its campaign message vast and wide, the exhibition features take-home posters inspired by the informal vein of Wolfgang Tillmans, one of the initiative’s most proactive local supporters. Moldovan artist Pavel Brăila’s contribution reads: “peace is when they are shooting somewhere else,” smeared in red viscera and graphically plastered in bullet holes. In Eastern Europe, we’re affected by a different type of heat.
Artistic director of Kyiv Perennial and cofounder of the Visual Culture Research Center (VCRC) Vasyl Cherepanyn observes two predominant impulses guiding indigenous art-production in a war-torn country: a courageous desire to resist by producing formal evidence and an engagement with the conceptual, humanistic experience of occupation itself. The general tendency of artists in this Perennial seems to involve distancing themselves from Western lineages like speculative realism, ambitioning instead a framework of reaffirming “the politics of truth.” Cherepanyn’s assessment echoes most distinctly in Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk’s Explosions Near the Museum (2023), a study of aesthetic dispossession and absence filmed at the Kherson Local History Museum, less than two kilometers away from the combatant Russian front. As strikes and missiles shake the earth beneath, an unaffected voice recounts the inventory of cultural artifacts to one day reclaim their places on the empty, damaged displays. A roughly five-hour subtitled screening of an anonymous YouTube upload, To Watch a War (A Film Found on the Internet) (2018) loops in the Kreuzberg basement of Between Bridges. Reminiscent of such counter-narrational, disorienting use of filmic media as Black Audio Collective’s Handsworth Songs (1986) or, more acute a comparison, Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujică’s Videograms of a Revolution (1992), the piece exposes a plethora of footage produced from the perspective of Russian separatists in the southeast of Ukraine (2014–18). In Russian: “Tell me, what do we do with the Nazis?” shouts one political speaker into a gathered crowd. “We don’t want to go to the fascist Europe,” yells another. Often breaking or rendered in poor quality, segments showcase political gatherings, angry mobs, Ukrainian flags being stripped down; bruised, bleeding “traitors” being tied to trees; vast fields, explosions, missiles, tanks. Several self-shot videos of masked soldiers in military uniform appear throughout the film. One shows the corpse of a civilian who was evidently shot in the head, fresh blood flowing down the sidewalk. Whereas Farocki’s interest resided in dissecting the cyclical relation between technological mediatization and the political subject during Romania’s revolution of ’89, this collage work takes us back to the simplicity of a town square format, exposing the discursive inversions of ideology turned realpolitik (gaslighting) as they instigate physical/military violence with barbarity laid bare. In the deliriously identitarian collectivist rhetoric leading up to militant radicalization, there’s no space for saying “I.”
Kyiv Perennial asserts itself as an anti-fascist and anti-colonial project, the implications of which convey a yet more profound commentary on the historical specificity of both Berlin and Ukraine. At a different nGbK location in Hellersdorf, an articulation of the German institution of Erinnerungskultur (culture of remembrance) takes place. Anna Scherbyna and Christina Werner’s Dust Covers the Landscape (2021) directly addresses one of the Holocaust’s largest mass shootings, at Babyn Yar, in September of 1941, just outside Kyiv—where 33,771 Jews were stripped naked and shot at point-blank range, bodies piling in humongous stacks of human flesh, overfilling the peripheral ravine over the span of two short days. Russia’s ongoing justifications for a “military operation” aimed at a stated goal of “denazification” in Ukraine serve as a prime example of historical terminology being abused into relativizing and perverting the very real history of Nazism in the most ignorant and malign ways. Such obfuscation exposes itself as colonialist in the power relations of its enactment, explained and propagated by the totalitarian regime of a country for which the protection of Jewish lives has historically been valued at little more than a toothpick, a regime to whom contemporary human rights continue to be of little to no concern. Ukraine’s leadership himself, President Zelensky, is a prime example of a Jewish life not fitting the colonizer’s bill.
Addressing the very history of such a dynamic, a compelling installation of aluminum-mounted reproductions by Leon Kahane, Gedenken unserer durch die Tat! (Commemorating Ourselves Through Past Actions!) (2022), continues the Perennial’s handling of the poster format, functioning as a meditation on the GDR’s propagandist maneuvering of tokenized Jewish survivors and resistance fighters of the Holocaust. His is a work rooted in a family history whose implications draw our attention to yet another long-forgotten historical fact: that the Soviet Union’s saviors’ posturing in relation to Nazism was conditioned into spectacle only for its own totalitarian, ultimately fascist, and also anti-Semitic policies—fraternal sympathies begetting the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, let’s also not forget. (Signed by Vyacheslav Molotov of the Soviet Union and Joachim von Ribbentrop of Nazi Germany in 1939, the pact secretly divided the European continent into two zones of influence, splitting Poland in half and endorsing Hitler’s subsequent invasion, approving Germany’s vision of an Eastern Europe to be judenrein.) Félix Guattari famously acknowledges the two signatories’ ideological commonalities in his essay “Everybody Wants to Be a Fascist” (1973), stating that “the differences are perhaps much greater between the [German, Spanish, and Italian] fascisms than between certain aspects of Stalinism and certain aspects of Nazism.” Bluntly summarized: Ukraine’s invasion isn’t the first time Russia has publicly propagated a pseudo-concern for the Jewish diaspora, only to mask policies resulting in its oppression, displacement, and killing. Anti-Semitism was alive and kicking during Czarist times, and throughout all stages of the Soviet project, leaving its mark and echo on the Russia of today. Insofar as fascism never posed a cohesive unitary ideological content as much as a form of totalitarian enactment—a hunger to dominate and avenge—the consistency on Russia’s behalf makes perfect sense. Fascism flows, after all, from a deep-seated sense of moral superiority, articulating itself into appearing rational, annihilating any form of ambivalence standing in its way.
And so, to the dangers of tolerating discourse built on acrobatic relativism and the dire consequences of historical obfuscation from which such discourse inevitably springs, the Kyiv Perennial seeks to be a wake-up call. Oh, how one tends to forget: Things, people, machines, guns, the meaning of old-school imperialism, literal fascism—they all cease to be so rudderless, so liberally negotiated, when homegrown privilege no longer affords your self-delusions time and space. Peace requires an embrace of ambiguity, enforced by a politics of factuality.
