The Kyiv International – Kyiv Biennial 2017 Program, Week 2

November 1–5, Wednesday – Sunday

On Wednesday, November 1, at 19:00 there will be a discussion, “Krytyka Polityczna Athens” by Katja Ehrhardt (AthenSYN) and Joulia Strauss (Avtonomi Akadimia) (Greece/Germany). Katja Ehrhardt will present her artistic research project entitled, “Universitas,” which is an educational model for a community of teachers and learners that transcends national and sociopolitical borders. Artists from Syria, Greece, and Germany came together with Athenians and migrants in workshops in Athens’ refugee camps and the venues of the Athens Biennale. The project poses the following question: What can we all learn from the refugee “crisis”? Joulia Strauss will present her project Avtonomi Akadimia and share her experience of the transformation of the educational system of Europe, presenting educational formats and practices as the next step in furthering activist art.

At 20:00, the artist Marta Madej (Poland/Germany) will present “In Memoriam Zygmunt Bauman,” in honor of the famous sociologist and philosopher Zygmunt Bauman (1925-2017), who passed away this year.

On Thursday, November 2, at 19:00 there will be a screening of the film “In Spring” (1929) by Mikhail Kaufman within the “Ukrainian Revolutionary Cinema Avant-Garde Series.”

On Friday, November 3, at 17:00 the artist and director Helmut Batista (Brazil) will give a talk entitled, “Deep Hanging Out” in which he will discuss CAPACETE – a program he founded in Rio de Janeiro in 1998 that includes an annual residency, seminar, publications, bookstore and much more.

At 19:00 there will be the “Acoustic Weapons: From the Walls of Jericho to the GitMo Playlist,” a performance by sound artist Sebastian Bayse Schäfer (Germany) featuring audio and video material in its most sinister forms, raising the question: Can sound actually kill someone?

On Saturday, November 4, at 16:00 in “Dread Nought! Fear not – in the Age of Anxiety” artists Judith Holzer & Marcel Schobel (Germany) will discuss their open Book Project in which they are collecting and sampling texts and images from various sources in order to formulate a new language.

At 19:00 the philosopher and cultural theorist Mikhail Ryklin (Germany) will deliver a lecture, “The Fiasco of World Revolution,” based on his latest book Doomed Icarus: Red October from a Family Perspective (2017), written ahead of the centennial of the October Revolution. In his book and lecture, Mykhail Ryklin explores how this event has influenced his family’s history. The author’s grand-uncle, Nikolai Chaplin, was one of the leaders of the Communist Youth League in 1924-1928, when the October Revolution was seen as nothing more than the first step towards a world revolution. After their hopes collapsed, Nikolai and his friends (Lazar Shatskin, Beso Lominadze, Alexander Kosarev) became victims of the Great Terror. The author’s grandfather, Sergei Chaplin, was a Soviet intelligence officer and was arrested in the case against his older brother. He served time in Leningrad’s Kresty Prison and Kolyma mine labor camp before his execution.

On Sunday, November 5, the artists and founders of the “Pirate Cinema” anti-copyright movement Jan Gerber and Sebastian Lütgert (Germany) will deliver the talk, “Pirate Cinema and New Forms of Action Against Politics and Art,” and three screenings:

14:00 Revolution 1 (French): Chris Marker, Gaspard Glanz, Ute Holl, Peter Ott, et al.
17:00 Revolution 2 (October): Kira Muratova, Peter Cherkasky, Artavazd Peleshian, Ken Jacobs, et al.
20:00 Revolution 3 (Digital): Dzyga Vertov, Alfred Hitchcock, Jean-Luc Godard, Philippe Grandrieux, et al.

Organized by Visual Culture Research Center (Kyiv, Ukraine).

Institutional Partners: Avtonomi Akadimia (Athens, Greece), BURSA Gallery (Kyiv, Ukraine), Columbia Global Centers | Paris (France), DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program (Berlin, Germany), De Balie (Amsterdam, the Netherlands), Depo (Istanbul, Turkey), Depot (Vienna, Austria), documenta 14 (Athens/Kassel, Greece/Germany), European Alternatives (Paris, France), Forum Transregionale Studien (Berlin, Germany), Hromadske TV (Kyiv, Ukraine), Institute for Human Sciences (Vienna, Austria), Medusa Books (Kyiv, Ukraine), National Oleksandr Dovzhenko Center (Kyiv, Ukraine), Political Critique (Warsaw, Poland), Shedhalle (Zurich, Switzerland), Studio 14 (Athens, Greece), Transeuropa Festival 2017 (Madrid, Spain), tranzit.cz (Prague, Czech Republic).

Partners: British Council / Delegation of the European Union to Ukraine, Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, ERSTE Foundation, European Cultural Foundation, International Renaissance Foundation, Robert Bosch Foundation.