6th Kyiv Biennial: A Bird That Cannot Land

"The sense by which we take our bearings in the real world […] is being destroyed." Hannah Arendt, "Truth and Politics"

The Kyiv Biennial is a nomadic, international project that interweaves artistic, political, and social issues. A Bird That Cannot Land, its chapter at KW, takes shape as an extensive live and discursive program and a large-scale exhibition spanning the entire building, contributing to the biennial’s reflections through contemporary art, sound, and exchange.

Situated in shifting political realities, A Bird That Cannot Land centers on the notion of a “Middle-East-Europe” and its histories of dispute, coloniality, and imperialism. Recurring conflicts reopen the wounds of those preceding them and challenge our sense of shared experience, language, and imagination. By linking post-Soviet Eastern Europe with Central and Southwest Asia, and the Mediterranean, the exhibition and its live and discursive events turn to questions on how we make meaning and experience belonging in times marked by war, uncertainty, and estrangement. Moving through realities where the continuity of meaning is broken, the biennial understands exile in and from the world as a central condition of contemporary life.

Amid this landscape, A Bird That Cannot Land aims to open spaces for listening to interconnected pasts and presents, and for rethinking how geographies, histories, and realities are told and perceived. The biennial features over 40 intergenerational and international voices from Berlin and beyond. The works featured are shaped by lived experiences echoing rupture, migrant memories, their affective architectures, and the historical traces that persist both in bodies and in the spaces we inhabit. 

The Kyiv Biennial’s live program unfolds through a range of formats, foregrounding Berlin’s diasporic communities in dialogue with translocal artistic practices. At its center, KW’s main hall hosts a week of concerts and performances exploring music’s affective force across diverse sonic practices and vocal traditions. This is extended through a series of listening sessions that explore different geopolitical dimensions of sound. Throughout the program, process-based practices approach polyphony as both an aesthetic and social practice of resilience.