Over the last few years, almost no other crisis hotspot has begun to shake Europe to the core as the Russian-Ukrainian conflict has. Apart from current developments on the refugee policy front, a somewhat incomparably disastrous scenario has developed near the European Union’s external border: on the one side, those who feel more drawn to Europe in its institutionalized form, on the other hand those who wish to assert their own territorial claims at any price. The entrenched incompatibility driving the situation is apparent in the complete lack of agreement even on the terminology; moves that one side describe as striving for independence are dubbed unilateral aggression by the other side, and vice-versa.
In the course of this dispute virtually no other cultural context has been exposed to the kind of stress test that has torn at the long-standing, historically developed cultural sphere that encompasses vast swathes of Eastern Europe, ranging from Kiev to Moscow and regions far beyond. The shared, common aspect, which indubitably exists, is often deliberately brushed aside, or denied for political and ideological reasons in this highly complex conflict situation, replete with repeated political moves of disengagement and usurpation.
The Kiev, Moscow and Beyond edition takes this year’s Kiev Biennale (held for the second time in 2015) as the point of departure for a critical reflection on this context; the biennale had been in the pipeline for more than two years, postponed over and over again due to the tumult of war and politics, before finally opening in early September 2015 – in the face of much resistance. Curated by Hedwig Saxenhuber and Georg Schöllhammer, and organized in conjunction with the independent research collective VCRC (Visual Culture Research Centre), The School of Kyiv (http://theschoolofkyiv.org) is structured in terms of various schools and tackles the following central themes: realism, landscape, image and evidence, displacement, lonesomeness, abducted Europe. All these schools, which encompass both exhibitions and series of discourse-based events, are linked by the same underlying question, namely how to establish and maintain a shared space for reflection that can bridge differences. A perhaps unstable, temporary space that would nonetheless extend beyond the well-trodden paths of politically propagated barriers or would constructively distinguish itself from the status quo.
The essays in this edition are actively involved in shaping and configuring this space for discourse. First of all, unavoidably in this context, Putin’s politics, as deeply puzzling to the West as they are frequently misunderstood. Stephen Holmes and Ivan Krastev analyze Putin’s power play by adding a dimension to the debate that has so far mostly been overlooked: the central question they ponder in their essay is whether this political stance could possibly be devised to reflect the West’s behavior, indeed to rip the liberal mask from the face of the West. In her essay Marci Shore examines the surreal extremes that this aggressive resistance, aimed primarily at dismantling the “other,” takes in everyday culture. Shore’s detailed discussion of Peter Pomerantsev’s study on Russia, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, makes clear how dramatically the coordinates of a conventional understanding of politics and of reality have begun to shift under Putin’s regime. “Everything is PR;” that’s the motto we hear from Shore, although it is often not clear what exactly is being promoted in what Pomerantsev dubs an inscrutable “reality show.”
Owen Hatherley and Agata Pyzik address broader (political and cultural) landscapes across Eastern Europe. Casting a rather wide net and also looking back to the days of the Soviet Union, they ask what has happened to the legacy of real socialism and indeed to the efforts undertaken on all fronts to move beyond it since 1989. Hatherley and Pyzik’s elucidations reveal, sometimes from a personal perspective, that the legacy of the pre-1989 era can scarcely be shaken off, both generally and particularly, yet demonstrate at the same time that the developments that succeeded real socialism left a great deal to be desired. This also includes the dismal situation facing Ukraine and Russia today, particularly in their relations to each other, a point addressed explicitly in other essays. Odessa-born artist Yuri Leiderman looks back to the pre-separation era and portrays what has always united and at the same time also divided Ukrainian and Russian artists. Leiderman’s current work for the Kiev Biennale, excerpts of which are presented here, picks up on precisely this issue. In it, an artistic procession through Odessa becomes the flashpoint against which all today’s political and above all separatist phantasmagoria shatter.
Haim Sokol and Larissa Babij also advocate a space of shared experience and existence. Sokol does so by picking up on the trauma that people of Jewish origin were always exposed to in both Russia and Ukraine; Babij takes the production of the Ukrainian group TanzLaboratorium as her point of departure to consider mutual recognition of various national or ethnic affiliations, even if only on the stage.
Here, as in the other essays in this edition, a question emerges that the School of Kyiv poses over and above the Biennale context, one that will indubitably continue to concern us: what form might a constructive dialogue between art and civil society assume, a dialogue in which processes fostering intellectual and artistic exchanges could take effect within a broader framework?