Near East, Far West. Kyiv Biennial 2025

The exhibition takes place in a time of ongoing wars, occupations, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Israel’s brutal operation in Gaza, and the broader fascist turn in global politics. The title Near East, Far West points to the current geopolitical reality and calls for a reorientation of the notions of ‘East’ and ‘West.’ The exhibition traces interrelated histories across what the curators name ‘Middle-East-Europe,’ a term encompassing Central & Eastern Europe, the former-Soviet Central Asia, and the Middle East. By questioning the (neo)colonial relationship between Europe and its so-called peripheries, the exhibition asserts that the fate of ‘Greater Europe’ is now being forged in its eastern borderlands. The exhibition looks to interconnect the ‘peripheries’ of the former West and open up a new perspective for the European project grounded in the experiences of Middle-East-Europe and its political complexities and historical entanglements.

Near East, Far West focuses on past and present trajectories of colonial violence, erasure and genocide in Middle-East-Europe, where various forms of imperial oppression continue to be endured. In this region, emancipatory attempts – from the Maidan and the Arab Spring to the protests in Georgia since January – have been met with war, the erection of new walls, mass displacements of people, right-wing political hatred, and the suppression of narratives that counter the status quo. As such, the current situation demands an existential and ethical reassessment of the notion of ‘Western values’ by which Europe is guided. Many artists from Middle-East-Europe distance themselves from the West as an ideological construct and from Western art as the only relevant tradition. Instead, they find inspiration and connections beyond the histories and territories that have dominated the globe over the last century.

The exhibition lays out a matrix of ongoing and historical violence through various technologies and systems of control. The artists employ diverse strategies of mapping, documenting and narrating which take visitors through interrelated contexts and experiences, and across time and space. Works track the movement of people, commodities, cultural artefacts, and acts of violence across Middle-East-Europe, from the archives of now-defunct 20th-century train networks and a 1970s gas pipeline between Siberia and West Germany, to the recording of Israeli aircraft invading Lebanese air space and the displacement of Ukrainian museum collections as a result of Russian bombardments today.

A number of works attempt a reckoning with the injustices and atrocities committed by past and ongoing forms of imperialism and colonialism, reflecting with historical consciousness on the role of art in vital – if ultimately failed – emancipatory visions. The story of a Moroccan filmmaker sent to Poland to study filmmaking techniques as part of the Eastern Bloc’s support for anti-imperialist struggles, the feminist journal Roza and its role in the ongoing striving for Kurdish autonomy, and a contemporary reevaluation of the legacies of the Ukrainian avant-garde are some of the many narratives visitors will encounter. They appear within a historical sequence that attempts to grasp the unfulfilled promises of liberating political change, suppressed by the militarization and radicalization of social life in the region.

For many of the participating artists, the violence of war remains a defining context and overarching horizon. The works in the exhibition show how violence has infiltrated all spheres of life, leading to the degradation of social cohesion and solidarity. The destruction of paintings and sculptures, the repression of authors, and the obliteration of land itself through war and exploitation are the consequence of the history and current militarized reality of Middle-East-Europe. Through addressing war trauma, corporeality, displacement, exile, and occupation, the selected artworks offer a mournful, critical response to the broken social, environmental and economic structures of the present.

While feelings of pain and loss triggered by the absence of peace and security across the region permeate the galleries, the exhibition holds onto the potential of an anti-imperial political alternative for a future European project. While such compelling stories of liberatory struggle appear to be in retreat today, tracing and reconstituting them in the face of renewed violence becomes another urgent task.

Near East, Far West is curated by Nick Aikens (HDK-Valand), Vasyl Cherepanyn (Visual Culture Research Center), Zippora Elders (Van Abbemuseum), Charles Esche (L’Internationale Association), Nav Haq (M HKA), Serge Klymko (Visual Culture Research Center), Magda Lipska (MSN).

Near East, Far West is featuring works by Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Kateryna Aliinyk, Tolia Astakhishvili, Ali Cherri, Lana Čmajčanin, Barış Doğrusöz, Navine G. Dossos, Assaf Gruber, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Majd, Abdel Hamid, Nikita Kadan, Dana Kavelina, Marina Naprushkina, İz Öztat & Zişan, Bojana Piškur, Oleksiy Radynski & Philipp Goll, Koka Ramishvili, Aykan Safoğlu, Hito Steyerl, Saule Suleimenova, Oraib Toukan, Lesia Vasylchenko, Artur Żmijewski, along with Oleksandr Bohomazov, Mykhailo Boychuk, Tymofiy Boychuk, Volodymyr Burliuk, Pavlo Gorily, Vasyl Yermylov, Kazimir Malevich, Vadym Meller, Solomon Nikritin, Oksana Pavlenko, Viktor Palmov, Anatol Petrytskyi, Mariia Syniakova, and Oleksandr Khvostenko-Khvostov.

More info here.