Vienna in late November recalls Franz Schubert’s Death and the Maiden quartet. It’s dark — bleak even — akin to time spent with the stereo and the lights down on a gray drizzly day. Austria’s capital city is synonymous with classical music, having been home in the late 1700s and early 1800s to Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert. It is also a city brimming with galleries, coffeehouses, and ghosts, a place where early-20th-century artists, writers, philosophers, and political radicals once gathered — including Gustav Klimt, Stefan Zweig, Sigmund Freud, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Leon Trotsky, and Adolf Hitler, a second-rate painter twice rejected by the local academy of fine arts. Then, as now, beware the failed artist. Rejection goosed by resentment stirs up shitstorms capable of turbocharging revanchist aesthetics of the most hateful sort.
There is, of course, another Vienna that history buffs and the majority of tourists don’t see. It’s full of sleekly designed restaurants, exclusive clubs, up-to-date global art collections, and kunsthalles in newfangled concrete and glass envelopes. Alongside these and other markers of urbanistic excellence, there survives an urgent if temporary effort to examine the fragility of civilization amid the glittering heart of contemporary Europe: the 2023 edition of the Kyiv Biennial. Aptly subtitled Against the Logic of War, the multivenue, multi-city exhibition was scrappy, underknown, and underfunded, yet compelling enough to outlast its late-December closing dates. Eyed from the power recliner of the West’s intellectual stupor, it is also probably the closest thing to a wake-up call for generations of culture lovers to take the illiberal backsliding of our new era seriously.
“When you set out to take Vienna, take Vienna.”
“I never knew the old Vienna before the war, with its Strauss music, its glamour and easy charm. Constantinople suited me better,” Carol Reed intones in the opening to The Third Man, his 1949 adaptation of Graham Greene’s novel, filmed on location in Freud’s “City of Dreams.”
Greene’s Cold War fiction still haunts Vienna in enduring ways. Organized by a band of multinational pro-democracy activists who rallied around Kyiv’s independent Visual Culture Research Center, the Kyiv Biennial has established its temporary headquarters in what is, according to the Polish website belsat.eu, still “widely regarded as the spying capital of the world.” (According to the same source, “at least a third of Russian diplomats in Vienna are believed to be spies.”) The Biennial’s mission impossible: to take on “war and displacement” via a gathering of more than 133 artists across Central and Eastern Europe that included whistlestops in the Ukrainian cities of Kyiv, Ivano-Frankivsk, and Uzhhorod, as well as Antwerp, Berlin, Lublin, and Warsaw.
“A multi-centric initiative in a European, interconnected form [based on solidarity],” is how the organizers, Hedwig Saxenhuber, Georg Schöllhammer, and Serge Klymko, describe both the overall project and its ambitious Vienna leg. Due to serious financial and temporal limitations — Saxenhuber confirms that the show was put on in a mere four months and “with not so much money” — the exhibition was spread out across independent spaces that evidently fight to keep the lights on. The main venue, an august edifice inside the city’s mulchy Augarten, is landmark-protected, so curators recruited architects to design a freestanding hanging system of exposed metal studs and particleboard walls. Inside, docents bundle up against the winter chill; at the unheated Neuer Kunstverein Wien, a former car dealership, 20-somethings gather around a space heater, wearing gloves, scarves, and overcoats.
If journalism is the first rough draft of history, then art is its reflective editor.
Despite handicaps, the Biennial takes a practical cue from a newly meme-worthy European dictator — not Vladimir Putin, but Napoleon Bonaparte, who once commanded, “When you set out to take Vienna, take Vienna.” Spread over eight sites that include the carriage-ready entrance of an 18th-century apartment building near the city center and an empty office in the immigrant-rich 20th district, the exhibition showcases the work of largely émigré Ukrainian creators, but also efforts by artists from other countries with memories of instability and war: Poland, Slovakia, Romania, Cuba, Colombia, and Syria among them. Together, this multigenerational group constitutes a 21st-century International Brigade of culture workers. What they promote, with varying measures of success but uniform defiance, are meditations on artistic freedom, but also living records of what happens to people and culture when war strikes. (In Ukraine, for one, it means young male artists are sent to the front, women and older artists relocate, cultural scenes are atomized; when possible, these are partially reconstructed according to daunting geographies, complex bureaucracies, and challenging new realities — the Kyiv Biennial being the biggest such attempt.)
Unsurprisingly, the Biennial’s straitened circumstances — support from the Ukrainian government vanished after being duly channeled to military expenditures — also affects the kind if not the quality of art on view. Videos in flexible digital formats proliferate, as do drawings easily shipped or toted inside suitcases; ginormous canvases by American auction house stars are out, as are Anselm Kiefer lead sculptures. Yet the Biennial in no way eschews boldface names. Light on its feet, the project boasts work by, among other museum luminaries, Wolfgang Tillmans (a large print of a Russian TV going to “snow” during the 2014 Euromaidan revolution that ousted pro-Russian Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych), Hito Steyerl (a three-channel video installation admixing images of luxury, gaming, and war), Yves Netzhammer (a stage set fusing computer graphics with Russian Constructivism), and the Danish collective Superflex. The latter group contributes the show’s most dazzlingly Instragrammable work: a room-size, ocean-blue neon sign that reads, with no shortage of understatement, There Is An Elephant in the Room (2019). To return to Kiefer momentarily, the whole Biennial can be seen as a rebuff of the German’s blowhard boast that lead is “the only material heavy enough to carry the weight of human history.”
If journalism is the first rough draft of history, then art is its reflective editor. Unlike Hamas’s murderous rampage inside Israel and Israel’s barbaric bombing of Gaza — which has led too many American artists to mistake art for snap judgments posted on social media — Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has led to that rare near-global consensus that Putin’s aggression constitutes a clear-cut case of Russophile national socialism. As such, it inverts Greene’s color-coded, skeptical worldview: Its complexities are best described less as black and gray, as the novelist once pegged human nature, than black and white. An existential conflict that encompasses the real possibilities of world-girding neofascism and nuclear destruction, the European war pits two utterly opposite global visions across a modern battlefield. One side arrays autocratic, repressive, ethno-nationalist forces bent on precisely the kind of violence for which the 1940s human rights jurist Raphael Lemkin coined the term genocide; the other, a participative democracy that, however fledgling and imperfect, employs the rule of law to protect its territory and, in theory, the rights of all people equally.
In the words of Yale historian Timothy Snyder, “It’s very rare for the authors of a war to openly declare at the beginning of a conflict that their aim is the total destruction of another people.” But that is exactly what Putin and comic-book-level villains like neo-fascist political theorist Aleksandr Dugin and the late Russian mercenary commander Yevgeny Prigozhin have done — from battlefield atrocities (including regular attacks on churches, apartment buildings, and schools inside Ukraine) to jailing artists (conceptualist Sasha Skochilenko was sentenced to seven years in prison for replacing supermarket price labels with actual information about the war) to blanket bans on LGBTQ+ organizations (Russia’s top court recently outlawed what it calls “the international LGBT movement”). Like Picasso showcasing Guernica at the 1937 Paris World’s Fair, the Kyiv Biennial’s participating artists and organizers have mobilized culture as “an offensive and defensive weapon” arrayed against a Thanos-like force that would declare difference, heterogeneity, and independent thinking punishable offenses.
“This is the first just war in my lifetime since Bosnia,” former foreign correspondent David Rieff told the Ukrainian philosopher Volodymyr Yermolenko, host of the Kyiv-based podcast “Thinking in Dark Times.” Speaking in a continental drawl spiked with Manhattan rhythms, Rieff, a noted writer and the son of the late Susan Sontag, paused a beat to deliver himself of what he believes to be the crucial difference between the February 24 invasion of Ukraine and other wars of colonial aggression. “What’s different in this war is the pretense,” he said, summing up Putin’s duplicitous and dehumanizing worldview. “The idea that [Russians] claim not just to be a superior civilization and culture, but [that they] also claim they’re rescuing [Ukraine].”
In Snyder’s historical telling, now bundled into a series of 23 university lectures titled “The Making of Modern Ukraine,” current Russian ideology has long laid itself bare for anyone who cares to quit looking the other way. “The practical part of genocide can be seen in 100,000 dead in Mariupol,” the Yale historian says, summing up 685 days of relentless barbarity, “in the 3 million Ukrainians deported, including a quarter of a million children who are to be forcibly assimilated into Russian culture, [in] the systematic campaign of rape and the murder of local elites in the territories that Russia controls, and, more banally but [just as] importantly, in the systematic attempt [by Putin’s forces] to destroy publishing houses, libraries and archives — which, of course, are the way societies and nations remember themselves.”
Back at Vienna’s leafy Augarten, puddles form in front of the entrance of what was once the atelier of a sculptor who made Nazi monuments (Saxenhuber calls the complex “a contaminated space”). Inside, a video titled Explosions Near the Museum (2023) loops mostly silent images to match Snyder’s words while displaying galleries of missing pictures and objects. Authored by the Ukrainian filmmaking duo Yarema Malaschuk and Roman Himey, the work provides a handheld camera accounting of hundreds of empty plinths, hooks, and display cases that track the looting — one curatorial text terms it “a strategic theft” — of 173,000 museum items, among them ancient gold and silver pieces, paintings, Greek artifacts, religious icons, and historical documents of shared Russian and Ukrainian history from the Kherson Local History Museum. The artists filmed the ransacked building in December of 2022 as fighting raged on — shelling and missile strikes are distinctly audible in the background.
A similarly urgent museological note is struck in a crucial collaboration between Kyiv-born artist Kateryna Lysovenko and Polina Baitsym, a curator of Neolithic art specializing in the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture, which flourished some 7,000 years ago. A large-scale painting of ancient figurines and fragments arranged in a talking circle, Invitation to Discuss Who Owns the Past (2023), posits the way the systematic theft and appropriation of heritage — by Russia, in this case, but also perpetrated by Britain, if we consider the British Museum’s Elgin Marbles — leads directly, with the logic of a 12-stepper’s relapse, to the evolution of colonial ideology. Nearby, Lysovenko contributes a group of related watercolors. Painted during the first months of the war, they illustrate wartime events of a less symbolic nature, in brushy, modest-size washes. Scenes of rape, murder, and destruction perpetrated by Russian troops, the works complete the cycle of dehumanization that follows when bellicose nations pillage other nations’ histories.
Other works directly reference events unfolding in real-time. Among these are photos by German photographer Friedrich Bungert. A regular contributor to Munich’s Süddeutschen Zeitung, the shutterbug reflects a disturbing reality routinely glimpsed on the streets of Kyiv, Dnipro, and Lviv. Portraits of maimed young men — they are missing arms, legs, noses, but also chunks of previous lives that their exhausted expressions only hint at — Bungert’s prints present a clutch of faces that stand in for more than 25,000 estimated war amputees. Another distressing wound in everyday reality is examined by Romanian artists Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor via a stack of kilo bags of flour. Sited directly on the floor like Carl Andre bricks, they feature the U.N.’s Déclaration universelle des droits de l´homme where the Pillsbury label should be. According to Article 15: “Everyone has the right to a nationality” and “No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.” (The text is in French, Spanish, Romanian, and Ukrainian — but, notably, not in Russian or English.)
Across town, in a set of ramshackle galleries called Never At Home, the spotlight is firmly on Kyiv’s LGBTQ+ community. Among the display’s livelier works are Anton Shebetko’s highly patterned photographs of veterans of the war in Ukraine’s Donbas region, which was begun in 2014 by Russian-backed separatists and has since been subsumed into the current conflict. Titled simply We Were Here (2018), the images literalize the razzle-dazzle that gay Ukrainian military personnel require to camouflage their sexuality when in uniform. If Kyiv sometimes resembles the 1930s Berlin of certain Christopher Isherwood stories, then Vladislav Plisetsky is its club-kid Joel Grey. His video What Will You Do When the War Starts (2023) channels a smartphone-inflected Cabaret. To term his manic narrative “high camp” is to call RuPaul a singer, or the original 1988 Hairspray a teen flick. While recording himself talking to his “girls,” the self-professed “guardian angel of the Kyiv underground” evaluates which nightclub would best serve as a bomb shelter. Odds are on the Kyrylivska club — it’s so underground it’s been called “the club that doesn’t exist.”
Despite being scattered throughout Mitteleuropa — Kyiv’s sole exhibition is a film program titled “The River Wailed Like a Wounded Beast” that takes as its subject Russia’s destruction of the Kakhovka Dam — this year’s Biennial represented a mammoth effort to triage a shattered artistic scene. The present destruction and subsequent diaspora receive a short prelude in a film by Alisa Sizykh, 15.02.22-24.02.22 KYIV (2023), which reproduces iPhone footage its budding director took of fellow art students days before Putin’s invasion. “We are making a short film and tomorrow there may be a war,” an off-camera voice says. A smiling face with fuzz for a mustache answers: “If the Russians come, they will fall in love with the Ukrainian girls and lay down their weapons.” The film ends with a mechanized howl: At 5 a.m. on February 24, the first air raid sirens wail the start of war.
Unable to travel to Kyiv as scheduled — a 20-hour one-way direct train trip from Vienna to Ukraine morphed overnight into 45 hours after a record snowstorm — I was desperate to seek out first-hand Ukrainian accounts of how culture, and specifically, visual culture, survives in conditions that include the threat of being pulverized by bombing, the terror of having life’s certainties suddenly erased from the civic ledger, and the panic of forced displacement. The show organizers kindly furnished a few contacts. I wrote and rang them. Among these was the WhatsApp contact for the aforementioned Kateryna Lysovenko, mother of two and, by my lights, an anchor artist of the Kyiv Biennial, due to her raw but considered meditations on Russian looting and violence.
Lysovenko responded to my queries in heavily accented English. After recounting parts of the harrowing ordeal she and her children suffered before securing a safe haven in Austria — “When we traveled west Russians were still shooting up civilian cars on the road; it was horrible” she recalled — I asked her to relay for me, in her own words and from where she was presently residing, the real value of the against-all-odds venture that was 2023 the Kyiv Biennial.
Her answer resembled that of a down-parka-wearing, smartphone-toting, modern-day refugee in a variation on the Flight into Egypt. “The Biennial is a possibility not just to be discussed by others, but to name yourself,” she said. “We have a name. We are in the room. We are artists and we are Ukrainians.” ❖
Christian Viveros-Fauné has covered art and its intersections with politics for the Village Voice and other publications for more than 25 years.
The post We Are Ukrainians: Learning From the 2023 Kyiv Biennial appeared first on The Village Voice.
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