The current edition of the Kyiv Biennial explores the fractures and upheavals that wars and colonialism etch into people’s lives, bodies, and spaces. It raises the question of whether an intermedia aesthetic is the approach of choice for art in times of multiple crises—and answers it through the diversity and power of the video installations on display.

The curatorial concept of the exhibition unfolds against the backdrop of the geopolitical space of “Middle-East-Europe,” which, according to the curators, encompasses post-Soviet Eastern Europe, Central and Southwest Asia, and the Mediterranean region. The experiences of a reality rife with violent conflicts lead here to the uprooting of people. Under such conditions, migration becomes the predominant relationship between individuals and space, and exile becomes the human conditionof our present. The eponymous bird that cannot land comes from the autobiographical narrative Zami by the American author and activist Audre Lorde (1934–1992) and serves as the exhibition’s guiding image—a metaphor for a restless, unsettled life that never reaches its destination and is constantly in a state of transition.

Centrally positioned in the KW’s main hall—and thus also programmatically central to the exhibition—is the expansive video installation Night Without Shadows and Light Without Rippling of Waves (2025) by Lesia Vasylchenko. In the upper part of the screen, natural history meets political archaeology; in the lower part, a seemingly endless dawn stands in contrast to the Ukrainian nocturnal sky. Decades of sunrises are compressed into a continuous emergence of light, while the night sequence uses historical film footage from 1918 to 2025 to condense moments from Ukraine’s political history into a fragmented yet coherent sequence. In this convergence of vastly different images—both technologically generated and historically sourced—the work also becomes a media-theoretical reflection on intermediality.