The main exhibition of the 6th Kyiv Biennial 2025, titled Near East, Far West and held at the newly opened Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, is organized by a consortium of curators from L’Internationale, a European confederation of museums, art institutions and universities. It features seven new artists’ commissions alongside works from the members’ collections and a number of international loans.

The exhibition takes place in a time of ongoing wars, occupations, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Israel’s brutal operation in Gaza, and the broader fascist turn in global politics. The title Near East, Far West points to the current geopolitical reality and calls for a reorientation of the notions of “East” and “West.” The exhibition traces interrelated histories across what the curators name Middle-East-Europe, a term encompassing Central Eastern Europe, the former-Soviet East, and the Middle East. By questioning the (neo)colonial relationship between European metropoles and their so-called peripheries outside the EU, it asserts that the fate of “Greater Europe” is now being forged in its eastern borderlands. The exhibition, and its staging in Warsaw, looks to interconnect the “peripheries” of the former West and reopen the experiences of Middle-East-Europe grounded in its political complexities and historical entanglements.

Near East, Far West focuses on past and present trajectories of colonial violence, erasure and genocide in Middle-East-Europe, where different forms of imperial oppression continue to be endured. In this region, emancipatory attempts have been met with war, the emergence of new walls, mass displacements of people, right-wing political hatred, and the suppression of narratives that counter the status quo. As such, today’s conjuncture demands an existential and ethical reassessment of the notion of “Western values” as something socially or politically worthwhile. Many artists here distance themselves from the “West” as an ideological construct, or “Western art” as a singular tradition. Instead, they find inspiration and connections beyond the histories and territories that have dominated the globe over the last century.

The exhibition lays out a matrix of ongoing and historical violence through different technologies and systems of control. Artists employ diverse strategies of mapping, routing, documenting and narrating which take visitors through interrelated contexts and experiences, and across time and space. Works track the movement of people, commodities, cultural artefacts, and acts of violence across Middle-East-Europe, from the archives of now-defunct 20th-century train networks and a 1970s gas pipeline between Siberia and West Germany, to the recording of Israeli aircraft invading Lebanese air space and the displacement of Ukrainian museum collections as a result of Russian bombardments today.

A number of works attempt a reckoning with the injustices and atrocities committed by past and ongoing forms of imperialism and colonialism, reflecting with historical consciousness on the role of art in vital—if ultimately failed—emancipatory visions. The story of a Moroccan filmmaker sent to Poland to study filmmaking techniques as part of the Eastern Bloc’s support for anti-imperialist struggles, the feminist journal Rosa and its role in the ongoing striving for Kurdish autonomy, and a contemporary reevaluation of the legacies of the Ukrainian avant-garde are some of the many narratives visitors will encounter. They appear within a historical sequence that attempts to grasp the unfulfilled promises of liberating political change suppressed by the militarization and radicalization of social life in the region.

For many of the participating artists, the violence of war remains a defining context and overarching horizon. The works in the exhibition show how violence has infiltrated all spheres of life, leading to the degradation of social cohesion and solidarity. The destruction of paintings and sculptures, the repression of authors, and the obliteration of land itself through war and exploitation are the consequence of the history and current militarized reality of Middle-East-Europe. Through addressing war trauma, corporeality, displacement, exile, and occupation, the selected artistic positions offer a mournful, critical response to the broken social, environmental and economic structures of the present.

While feelings of pain and loss triggered by the absence of peace and security across the region permeate the galleries, the exhibition holds onto the potential of an anti-imperial political alternative for a future European project. While such compelling stories of liberatory struggle appear to be in retreat today, tracing and reconstituting them in the face of renewed violence becomes another urgent task.

Graphic design concept: Anja Groten and Katherina Gorodynska

Organized by: L’Internationale, VCRC, MSN Warsaw

Supported by: Creative Europe, Ribbon International, Sigrid Rausing Trust, Foundation for Arts Initiatives