Kyiv Biennial 2025: Homelands and Hinterlands
20 Sep 2025 - 11 Jan 2026
A group exhibition featuring works by: Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Davyd Chychkan, Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze, Mona Hatoum, Iman Issa, Mashid Mohadjerin, Ala Savashevich, Anna Zvyagintseva
Following the trans-national format of the 2023 edition, the Kyiv Biennial 2025 will again take place in multiple locations across Europe. Muhka 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).
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.
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, Belarusian dictatorial rule.
The exhibition’s title Homelands and Hinterlands refers to the (post-)colonial notion of ‘hinterlands’, meaning the ‘lands behind’, and applied to the surrounding areas of former European colonies that are claimed by metropole powers. This conception involves recognising the economic, geographic, cultural and political significance of hinterlands in relation to the colonial centres that they resource.
The two parallel presentations at MSN and Muhka focus on past and present experiences of colonial violence, erasure and genocide in 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 Muhka 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 facing destruction might also motivate us to find an emancipatory way out of the current conjuncture of obliteration.
For several of the participating artists, the violence of war and oppression remains a defining context. By questioning the colonial relationship between fading European metropoles and their so-called peripheries 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. 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.
Curated by:
Vasyl Cherepanyn, Visual Culture Research Center / Kyiv Biennial
Nav Haq, Associate Director, Muhka
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 Muhka is a founding member.
The iterations in Warsaw and Antwerp will be followed immediately after by two projects in Ukraine, at the Dnipro Center for Contemporary Culture and the Dovzhenko Centre in Kyiv respectively, and the last of the exhibitions to open as part of the Kyiv Biennial 2025 taking place at the Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz.
Organised by the Visual Culture Research Center, the Kyiv Biennial is an international forum for art, knowledge, and politics that integrates exhibitions and discussion platforms. Embedded in a wide horizontal network of cultural institutions, centres and artistic practices, the Kyiv Biennial aims to situate art and public programming amidst the current transformation of Europe and the world.
