Kiev Art Biennale in Berlin curated by Wolfgang Tillmans | EUROtoday

SShards of damaged glass pipes lie on the marble ground, and a few fragments of the large industrial-style chandelier are hooked up to steel rods on the ceiling. A glass entrance behind this vanitas set up offers a view of the Berlin tv tower. The destroyed chandelier is a part of the paintings “Salute” by Danylo Halkin, which in flip is a part of a multi-part set up by the artist initiative DE NE DE, and initially comes from the Salyut cinema in Dnipro, inbuilt 1975/76. Now it has been transported to the gallery rooms of the brand new Society for Fine Arts (nGbK) on Berlin's Alexanderplatz. The chandelier as soon as measured an enormous 5 by 5 meters and consisted of a complete of 1,600 parts within the type of a glass firework. Now there are solely shards left.

Big metropolis and the Middle Ages

In the background you possibly can hear polyphonic synthesizer melodies by the Kiev composer Heinali, whose actual title is Oleh Shpudeiko and who is not any stranger to the worldwide experimental music scene. On this night of February twenty third, he’ll current his album “Kyiv Eternal,” which he launched a yr earlier to mark the primary anniversary of the Russian invasion. Field recordings from the Ukrainian capital earlier than the conflict, captured noise from the tram, metro station bulletins, hen songs, and the sounds of nighttime walks kind the conceptual foundation of the album, together with the medieval-inspired polyphonic melodies which are attribute of Heinali's compositions.

As a part of the “Kyiv Perenniale” there have been exhibition openings on three evenings final weekend, other than the one within the nGbK on Alex, additionally within the Kreuzberg gallery Between Bridges and within the ngbk in Hellersdorf. The date not solely marks precisely two years of the foremost Russian invasion, but additionally ten years of the Maidan Revolution and the related Russian aggression. The exhibition collection of Ukrainian artwork is designed as a continuation of the worldwide Kyiv Biennale 2023, as a part of which occasions have been happening since October not solely in Kiev, but additionally in Ivano-Frankivsk, Uzhhorod, Warsaw, Lublin, Antwerp and Vienna. The adjective “perennial” means one thing like everlasting or fixed in English.

According to its personal description, the intention of the Biennale undertaking is to “bring back together the community of Ukrainian artists who have been scattered across Europe due to the war” and to develop creative solutions to the quite a few challenges dealing with Ukraine – be they cultural or social – along with worldwide colleagues or ecological nature – to current. The director of the Visual Culture Research Center (VCRC) in Kiev, Vasyl Cherepanyn, is accountable for the creative path of all the biennale; the massive curatorial crew for the Berlin department Perenniale consists, amongst others, of Jörg Heiser, Lena Prents and Wolfgang Tillmans.

In a small room of the nGbK to the left of the doorway, the set up “Everybody Wants to Live by the Sea” from 2014 by Nikita Kadan takes you on a journey by way of time by way of the historic layers of Crimea, which has been underneath Russian occupation since 2014: One A curved neon tube within the attribute form of the peninsula hangs in the midst of the small room above the guests' heads and envelops them in chilly gentle, whereas a palm tree creates a type of vacation ambiance.