Suspended in the Sky: Kyiv Perennial in Berlin and the Story of a Bird That Cannot Land

“The sense by which we find our way in the real world is being destroyed.”

This heavy sentence by Hannah Arendt greets you at the foot of the stairs the moment you step through the doors of the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin. When a geography, a home, or the very memory of a human being is shattered into pieces, how do we find our direction again? The Kyiv Perennial (Kyiv Biennial) is a nomadic memory laboratory tracking precisely these disoriented lives that have spilled off the map. Having drifted from Warsaw to Antwerp, and from Dnipro to Linz throughout 2025, the project is now staging a global display of strength in Berlin with a massive exhibition taking over the entire KW building floor by floor. Its title summarizes everything: A Bird That Cannot Land.

Co-curated by Sofie Krogh Christensen from the KW team and Vasyl Cherepanyn from the Visual Culture Research Center in Kyiv, this expanded structure completely erases institutionalized boundary lines. The exhibition centers around a hybrid concept that shakes up hierarchies: “East-Central Europe.” It constructs an imaginary yet aching corridor connecting post-Soviet Eastern Europe to Central and Southwest Asia and the Mediterranean. Within this corridor, the traces of colonialism, imperialism, and overlapping exile stories are tracked. Moreover, you do not listen to this narrative from a single voice; you experience it through the brushes and cameras of more than 40 international artists from different generations across the globe, including Mona Hatoum, Hito Steyerl, Hiwa K, Geta Brătescu, Lida Abdul, Saodat Ismailova, and Samia Halaby.

You do not tour the exhibition merely with your eyes; the sounds and live performances spreading across the rooms literally surround you. Concerts, performances, and listening sessions by voices such as the Anatolian Women’s Choir Seyyare, Bulgarian Voices Berlin, and Abdullah Miniawy transform KW’s naked main hall into a shattering auditory memory space. Here, sound does not operate merely as aesthetic background music; it functions as a method of resistance and survival in its own right.

The fundamental question the perennial asks is the very concept of exile. However, it does so without falling into a cheap, tearful nostalgia trap stuck in the past; it dissects exile as a naked condition of life shared by millions of people today. How is a new meaning invented in places where linear coherence and that safe space we call home are broken? How do bodies carrying the past bear and walk that past in a new space, in a new city? Set to run from June 11 to September 13, 2026, at Auguststraße 69, this exhibition does not promise you seamless answers. It simply makes you feel the tremendous collective resilience in the wingbeats of that bird suspended in mid-air, unable to find a branch to land on.

Exhibition Details:

• Exhibition Framework: Kyiv Perennial 2026 (Kyiv Biennial)
• Exhibition Title: A Bird That Cannot Land
• Venue: KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Auguststraße 69, Berlin
• Dates: June 11 – September 13, 2026
• Curators: Sofie Krogh Christensen & Vasyl Cherepanyn
• Featured Artists Include: Mona Hatoum, Hito Steyerl, Hiwa K, Geta Brătescu, Lida Abdul, Saodat Ismailova, Samia Halaby.