Kyiv Biennial 2025: Homelands and Hinterlands

Following the trans-national format of the 2023 edition, the Kyiv Biennial 2025 will again take place in multiple locations across Europe. Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp (M HKA) presents a stand-alone exhibition that acts also as an extension of the main biennial exhibition held at the newly-opened Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (MSN).

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Kyiv Biennial 2025 situates itself amidst the lived reality of war crimes, illegal occupations, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and the broader autocratic turn in global politics, including Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Israel's brutal operation in Gaza, Iran’s totalitarian theocracy and Belarusian dictatorial rule. In reckoning with the injustices and atrocities committed by the imperialisms of today, Kyiv Biennial 2025 reflects with historical consciousness on failed solidarities and internationalisms. It does this across an axis that the curators describe as Middle-East-Europe, a term encompassing Central Eastern Europe, the former-Soviet East and the Middle East. The exhibition’s title Homelands and Hinterlands refers to the (post-)colonial notion of ‘hinterland’, meaning the 'lands behind', and applied to the surrounding areas comprising of former European colonies claimed by metropole powers. This conception here involves recognising the economic, geographic, cultural and political significance of hinterlands in relation to the colonial centres that they resource.

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The two parallel presentations at MSN and M HKA focus on past and present experiences of colonial violence, erasure and genocide across Middle-East-Europe – geographies that have witnessed compelling stories of emancipatory struggle that appear to be in retreat today, making their tracing and reconstitution in the face of renewed violence an urgent task. The presentation at M HKA is more acutely focused on the notion of ‘erasure’, in the past but also very much in the present – the erasure of people through dehumanisation, killing and crimes against humanity – the erasure of memory – the erasure of the normality of everyday life – the desire to erase the long shadow of ideologies of the 20th century – the erasure of images – the erasure of plurality in the political spectrum – or even the erasure of information technologies that we have become dependent on. In the best scenario, we can hope that, in the face of destruction, we might also be motivated to find an emancipatory way out of the current conjuncture of obliteration.

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For several of the participating artists, the violence of war, oppression and displacement remains a defining context. By questioning the colonial relationship between fading European metropoles and their so-called peripheries and hinterlands outside the EU, Kyiv Biennial 2025 asserts that the fate of ‘Greater Europe’ is now being forged in its parallel relations to its eastern borderlands and beyond. The exhibition looks to interconnect these ‘peripheries’ of Europe, and reopen the experiences of Middle-East-Europe grounded in its political complexities and historical entanglements.

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The exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw is organised by a consortium of curators from the L'Internationale confederation of European museums, art institutions and universities, of which M HKA is a founding member.