Questions are mounting over the fate of the 2015 Kyiv International Biennale of Contemporary Art, now scheduled to take place this autumn.
The event that is Ukraine’s biggest modern art display had been originally scheduled for 2014, but postponed and then cancelled. But the biennale’s curators say the event will take place anyway.
The national art and cultural complex Mystetsky Arsenal, the biennale’s organizer and main venue, was working with its selected curators, Georg Schöllhammer and Hedwig Saxenhuber, and the event, entitled “The School of Kyiv,” was set to take place in the second half of the year.
But on March 20, Mystetsky Arsenal announced that it was cancelling the 2015 Kyiv Biennale, citing Ukraine’s continuing crisis.
Then on March 24, Schöllhammer and Saxenhuber posted an announcement on the Visual Culture Research Center site saying that the 2015 version was moving ahead anyway, even without Arsenal, but with the support of other institutions. They are set to announce the new dates and institutions on April 17.
In their statement, they also stressed the need for art in times of war: “The fundamental role of art as a reflexive instrument is to challenge the present political context defined by the armed conflict in Ukraine.”
The curators slammed Arsenale’s cancellation as “purely political.”
“Our concept was too political for them and they just wanted to host an event,” they wrote.
Alisa Lozhkina, the deputy director of Mystetsky Arsenal, denies this, telling the Artinfo website that she and her colleagues knew of the curators’ political nature when she helped select them.
Arsenal’s director, Natalia Zabolotna, complains that Arsenal paid the curators an advance. She also says that it was not the curators, but the Arsenal crew, that developed the educational component and theme for the 2015 event.
In the summer of 2013, Zabolotna was criticized for allegedly censoring the work of Ukrainian artist Volodymir Kuznetsov during an exhibition at Mystetsky Arsenal because of its anti-religious motives. A number of Ukrainian artists have since said that they would have boycotted the next biennale if it had taken place at Arsenal because of the incident.
If the 2015 Kyiv International Biennale does in fact take place, it will be the city’s second. In 2012, David Elliott, the British art historian and critic, curated the inaugural biennale, giving international exposure to a number of Ukrainian artists.
Kyiv Post staff writer Yulia Sosnovska can be reached at [email protected]
