This is less an article about the exhibition itself than about the experience of being inside it—and about a question that stayed with me afterwards: 

what happens when an exhibition succeeds in making us feel intensely, but leaves little space for us to respond?

Kyiv Biennial: A Bird That Cannot Land is presented at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin from 11 June to 13 September 2026. The exhibition brings together more than forty international and intergenerational artistic positions and extends across the entire KW building. Its curatorial framework examines war, displacement, coloniality, migration, borders and contested histories across what the Biennial describes as a “Middle-East-Europe” — a region understood less as a fixed geography than as a field of overlapping political and historical conditions. The exhibition is curated by Sofie Krogh Christensen with Linda Franken and Radia Soukni, alongside an extended curatorial team.

Figure 01. Lesia Vasylchenko, Night Without Shadows and Light Without Rippling of Waves, 2025/2026. Installation view, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin. Video: Patrizia Litty, 2026.

Before I even entered the exhibition there was a threshold.

A thick black wool curtain covered the entrance. I stood in front of it for longer than I expected. Behind it was darkness, and already there were intense sounds coming from somewhere inside.

I hesitated.

There was something about having to physically pull the curtain aside and step into a space I could not see that made me nervous before I had encountered a single work.

Eventually I went in.

And almost immediately I felt that I was no longer simply looking at an exhibition. I had entered something.

Figure 02. Gulnur Mukazhanova, Material as Memory, 2026. Installation view, Kyiv Biennial: A Bird That Cannot Land, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin. Photo: Patrizia Litty, 2026.

The intensity of this encounter was not entirely incidental. KW’s own accessibility information describes the exhibition space as darkened and explicitly warns that the exhibition contains representations of racism, death, war, physical violence and psychological violence. KW also notes that approximately 27 works are installed across the building, with around 244 minutes of audiovisual material in total. A visitor attempting to experience every work in full would spend approximately four and a half hours inside the exhibition (KW Institute for Contemporary Art, 2026). 

The Biennial’s wider programme makes clear that affect is not peripheral to its curatorial thinking. KW describes the project as bringing together contemporary art, sound and exchange, with works shaped by “lived experiences” of rupture, migration and histories that persist in bodies and spaces. Its live programme explicitly investigates music’s affective force, while associated events include listening sessions, performances and somatic formats (KW Institute for Contemporary Art, 2026). 

Figure 03. Dana Kavelina, Grey Earth, 2026. Stop-motion film, installation view, Kyiv Biennial: A Bird That Cannot Land, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin. Video excerpt filmed by Patrizia Litty, 2026.

It was incredibly intense and hard to handle. At some point I nearly felt nauseous, and afterwards I wondered whether that was really necessary.

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Empirical research supports a distinction between emotional impact and political effectiveness. In a study involving nearly 1,400 participants encountering The Troubles and Beyond at the Ulster Museum in Belfast, Balcells and Voytas (2025) found that the exhibition produced strong emotional responses, yet these did not correspond to significant changes in participants’ perceptions of the conflict or their preferences for how it should be addressed. Similarly, Pelowski et al. (2026), studying socially focused exhibitions addressing refugees and climate change, found that artists and curators could successfully elicit intended emotional responses, while the relationship between those emotions and subsequent attitude change remained considerably less consistent. Emotional intensity, therefore, cannot in itself be taken as evidence of an exhibition’s political or social effectiveness. The more useful question may be what that emotional response enables afterwards: greater understanding, reflection, dialogue or action (Balcells and Voytas, 2025; Pelowski et al., 2026)

Figure 04. ‘mehr / more’, exhibition signage with adjacent toilet sign, Kyiv Biennial: A Bird That Cannot Land, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, 2026. Photograph: Patrizia Litty.

At some point I moved towards a window, almost instinctively, to take a breather.

Looking down into the courtyard, I could see people sitting under the trees in the shade, having lunch, talking and laughing. It was a completely ordinary summer afternoon. Life was continuing just a few metres away.

The contrast was strange. I was standing inside an exhibition filled with war, displacement, violence and loss, while below me people were eating and chatting in the sunshine. For a moment it felt as though I was looking into a parallel universe.

Rather than relieving what I was feeling, the normality of the scene seemed to intensify it.

There was something very one-way about the experience. I stood there with tears and a huge emotional response, but there was nobody to give that response back to. The exhibition kept speaking, and I kept receiving. I was inside it physically and emotionally, and I could not simply switch it off.

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There is some evidence that providing visitors with a means to respond can change how an emotionally difficult exhibition is processed. In a small experimental study at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Betts et al. (2015) compared visitors who simply experienced the exhibition with those who were subsequently invited to make art in response, write reflectively and discuss their experience with others. Participants given these opportunities reported greater consolidation and understanding of the experience, and showed increased immediate empathy whose effects remained detectable in follow-ups at two, seven and twelve months. They were also more likely to discuss complex aspects of the exhibition afterwards rather than communicating primarily their distress or historical information. Significantly, however, the intervention did not increase participation in social or political action. The study is small, involving only twenty-two participants, but it suggests that giving viewers space to articulate, share and process an emotional response may help transform an intense museum encounter from something merely received into something reflected upon and exchanged (Betts et al., 2015).

Figure 05. Installation view, Kyiv Biennial: A Bird That Cannot Land, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, 2026. Photograph: Patrizia Litty.

Looking back, the exhibition felt at times more like a thriller or horror film than a space for reflection. The darkness, sound, repetition and accumulation of distressing material seemed designed to keep intensifying the experience, almost pushing the viewer towards an emotional threshold.

Most people around me appeared to move through it without difficulty, which made me wonder whether we have become so accustomed to constant stimulation that exhibitions increasingly need to become louder, darker and more immersive in order to make us feel anything at all.

What I found myself wanting instead was more information, more context and more room to think. Not a didactic exhibition, and not less contemporary art, but an exhibition able to hold complexity through documents, histories, testimony, images, objects and quieter forms of mediation. I wanted less spectacle and less emotional escalation, and more material that allowed me to understand the subject rather than primarily experience its intensity.

Perhaps an exhibition that deliberately asks so much emotionally of its visitors could also provide a space in which that experience can be processed. This need not be elaborate: a quieter room, a place to sit and talk, an invitation to write something down, a wall on which visitors can leave responses, or simply somewhere to pause before returning to the outside world. The point would not be to prescribe another response, but to make the encounter less one-directional — to allow the viewer to move from receiving towards reflecting, articulating or exchanging.

Research into visitor responses to difficult museum material suggests that opportunities for reflection, discussion and creative response can help visitors process and integrate emotionally demanding experiences, even if they do not necessarily translate into political action (Betts et al., 2015).

References

Balcells, L. and Voytas, E. (2026) ‘The Troubles and Beyond: The impact of a museum exhibit on a post-conflict society’, American Journal of Political Science, 70(3), pp. 1146–1163. doi: 10.1111/ajps.70001.

Betts, D.J., Potash, J.S., Luke, J.J. and Kelso, M. (2015) ‘An art therapy study of visitor reactions to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’, Museum Management and Curatorship, 30(1), pp. 21–43. doi: 10.1080/09647775.2015.1008388.

KW Institute for Contemporary Art (2026) Kyiv Biennial: A Bird That Cannot Land.

Pelowski, M., Marengo, E., Cotter, K.N., Kühnapfel, C., Speidel, K. and Fingerhut, J. (2026) ‘Designing emotions as mediators of attitude change from socially-focused art exhibitions: Two studies of matched artist/curator intentions and viewer response on the refugee crisis and climate awareness’, Empirical Studies of the Arts, 44(1), pp. 195–255. doi: 10.1177/02762374251349376.

Kandinsky, Improvisation and the Making of Abstraction

Beyond the World. The Blue Rider at Munich’s Lenbachhaus brings together more than 240 works by artists including Kandinsky, Münter, Marc, Jawlensky and Werefkin, focusing on the years around the Blaue Reiter exhibitions of 1911–12. Curated by Melanie Vietmeier and Matthias Mühling, the show presents the group as an international network rather than a single stylistic movement.

Fig. 01. Kandinsky, W. (1911) Romantische Landschaft. Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau München. Photograph by author, 2026.

The Lenbachhaus gives an almost overwhelming first impression—a structure poised somewhere between stately grandeur and, once one enters the courtyard garden, complete romanticism. The mood is already set, yet it offers little preparation for what follows. Entering the first exhibition room devoted to Kandinsky feels like a sudden plunge into abstraction at its most vivid. Colour seems to move across the canvases; shapes collide, dissolve and re-form; compositions pulse with an almost physical energy. It is difficult to reconcile these works with the fact that they were made at the beginning of the twentieth century, during years in which Europe was moving steadily towards the First World War. Yet here the visible world seems to loosen its grip. Landscape, object and figure begin to dissolve into colour, rhythm and sensation. For a moment, one enters a kind of bubble of vivid life, summer and joy—luminous, restless and strangely detached from the historical weight gathering outside it.

Fig. 2. Kandinsky, W. (1910) Murnau mit Kirche I. Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau München. Photograph by author, 2026.

The Lenbachhaus began as the home and studio of the celebrated nineteenth-century portrait painter Franz von Lenbach, who built the Tuscan-style villa between 1887 and 1890. Acquired by the City of Munich, it opened as a municipal gallery in 1929. Its transformation into one of the most important museums of early modernism, however, came several decades later through Gabriele Münter. (Lenbachhaus)

Kandinsky, born in Moscow in 1866, originally studied law and economics before abandoning an academic career and moving to Munich in 1896, aged thirty, to study painting. Münter entered his class at the Phalanx art school in 1902 and the two became a couple the following year. They travelled extensively before returning to Bavaria in 1908, where, together with Alexej Jawlensky and Marianne von Werefkin, they spent an intensely productive summer painting in Murnau. The Lenbachhaus identifies this period—with its increasingly simplified forms, flattened space and liberated colour—as a crucial beginning of what would become Der Blaue Reiter. (Lenbachhaus)

Münter was not simply Kandinsky’s companion but an important painter and participant in the Blue Rider herself. In 1911 she left the Neue Künstlervereinigung München together with Kandinsky and Franz Marc and took part in the first Blaue Reiter exhibition. (Lenbachhaus) Decades later, in 1957, she gave the Lenbachhaus more than one thousand works connected with the group, including ninety oil paintings and around 330 watercolours and drawings by Kandinsky, alongside her own work and that of Marc, Macke, Klee, Jawlensky and Werefkin. The donation established the Lenbachhaus as the world’s largest collection of Der Blaue Reiter. (Lenbachhaus)

It is because of this extraordinary intersection of artistic partnership, preservation and generosity that Kandinsky’s development can be followed here with such clarity—from the still recognisable landscapes of Murnau towards the increasingly liberated world of the Impressions and Improvisations.

Fig. 3-5. Kandinsky, W. (1911) Impression III (Konzert). Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau München. Photograph by author, 2026.

I would keep the wonder and the slightly lyrical movement, but make the Frankenthaler/Mitchell reference explicitly retrospective:
Standing before Impression III (Konzert), I wondered at how completely Kandinsky had begun to set painting free. Shapes still hover at the edge of recognition, fragments that might once have belonged to figures, architecture or landscape, but they are already dissolving into colour and rhythm. Kandinsky seems to have spread his wings and flown far beyond conventional landscape painting. Looking from the present, faint echoes of Helen Frankenthaler’s colour fields and Joan Mitchell’s expansive abstraction inevitably cross my mind—not as influences, of course, but as later resonances. Then I return to Kandinsky, listen again to the music of the painting, and allow myself to get lost in it.

Fig. 6. Kandinsky, W. (1911) Improvisation 19. Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau München. Photograph by author, 2026.

The Blue Rider: A New Visual Language

Der Blaue Reiter grew out of an intense exchange between artists rather than a fixed movement with one style. Kandinsky, Gabriele Münter, Alexej von Jawlensky and Marianne von Werefkin had already spent the summer of 1908 painting together in Murnau, experimenting with stronger colour, simplified forms and an increasing freedom from conventional representation. By 1911 Kandinsky and Franz Marc were developing the Blaue Reiter almanac, while Kandinsky, Marc and Münter broke away from the Neue Künstlervereinigung München after one of Kandinsky’s increasingly abstract works was rejected from an exhibition.

What seems most exciting about the Blue Rider today is precisely this sense of openness. There was no single visual language to follow. Münter remained closely connected to landscape and everyday life, Marc transformed animals through symbolic colour, while Kandinsky pushed further towards abstraction. What united them was perhaps less a style than a desire to move beyond what could simply be seen—to find ways of expressing inner experience, emotion and something spiritual through colour, rhythm and form. Music, folk art, children’s drawings and non-European traditions all entered this expanded field of possibility. The first Blaue Reiter exhibition opened in Munich in December 1911, followed by a second in 1912, bringing together very different artists around this shared sense that painting could become something more than representation.

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A truly ambitious and deeply impressive exhibition, spanning the different artists and approaches of Der Blaue Reiter. Yet my attention remained with Kandinsky. I found myself returning to his paintings again and again, unable to let go of their exuberance, their colour and movement—as if trying to capture something of the unmistakable joy Kandinsky himself must have experienced as painting opened up before him and he discovered a new artistic freedom.

Random reflections on this comprehensive exhibition across four floors of the museum. The show was divided into four acts + the prologue, like a play. The prologue on the ground floor served as both an introduction and a conclusion, creating an infinite loop.

The central question is anchored in Kate Millet’s work: Terminal Piece, and asks – Who is watching? Who is seen? Where do we position ourselves?

ACT 1 – the tension of looking

Fig. 01. MILLETT, Kate. Terminal Piece (1972). Installation view, mumok, Vienna, 2026. Photograph by author.

The work reverses the usual position of the viewer. It resembles the audience space of a theatre, with only one figure seated behind a fence, while we stand on the other side — almost as if we are on stage. We look at the audience while also looking at an artwork. But are we still viewers, or have we become part of the work ourselves? And does the fence separate us from the work, or place us inside a cage?

Fig. 02. PLUNKETT, Megan. Dissembalancer (2020–2026). Installation view, Terminal Piece, mumok, Vienna, 2026. Photograph by author.

Plunkett’s mother, who had dementia, created small assemblages from everyday objects. Trained as a forensic photographer, Plunkett examines them almost as evidence: photographing them from different angles, turning them upside down, moving close and then distancing herself. But what is she actually looking at — the assemblages, her mother, or her mother’s illness? And who is she while looking: daughter, artist, or forensic observer?

Fig. 03. ADI, Kobby. The Machine (2026). Installation view, Terminal Piece, mumok, Vienna, 2026. Photograph by author.

The work by Kobby Adi consists of a heavy metal laboratory table, cables and multiple live video feeds. The UV lightbox, normally used to illuminate DNA samples, is left empty with its door open. A live feed shows the inside of the empty box, so the sculpture appears to transmit its own interior and presence.

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How do we assimilate what happens around us? How do larger forces, energies and developments in the world enter into and shape our personal lives?

These are the questions at the heart of ACT 2. This part of the exhibition brings together film, assemblage, painting and sculpture, often incorporating everyday objects. Across these works, the larger world is refracted through the intimate and familiar, tracing how political, social and cultural currents register within the small universe of personal experience.

Figs. 04 to 06. Birgit Jürgenssen, Schwarzer Honig der Träume [Black Honey of Dreams], 1992 (1989). Black-and-white photographs, rayograms, latex, voile and tulle, 90 × 210 cm. Three installation views, mumok, Vienna. Photographs: author, 2026.

The figures and objects in this work—a subtle combination of white, sepia and black—feel partly hidden and distant, like traces of memory. Layered upon one another, they evoke times past and a sense of something gradually disappearing. We are not looking at a single moment in time; rather, we are observing time itself as it moves, transforms, destroys and recreates—yet remains something we can never quite grasp.

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Figs. 07/08. Louis Goodman, selected assemblages, installation view from Terminal Piece – Act 2, mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna, 2026. Photographs: author, 2026.

The sculptures of artist and inventor Louis Goodman, assembled from everyday objects, reveal both meticulous craftsmanship and an unmistakable visual wit. Whether transforming an iron with beads and chains or giving a whisky bottle a pair of sunglasses, Goodman clearly delighted in exposing the absurdities of consumer culture.

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How do we live in, confront, and adapt to a world that feels overwhelming and strange? The artists in this part of the exhibition use the microcosm of their lived experience as a springboard for engaging with the macrocosm of society.

Fig. 09. Magdalena Abakanowicz, Booby Trap, 1987, from the series War Games. Wood and metal. Installation view, mumok, Vienna. Photograph: Patrizia Helene Litty, 2026.

Fig. 10. Christine Gironcoli, Die Hand des Generaldirektors, date unknown. Installation view, Terminal Piece, mumok, Vienna. Photograph: Patrizia Helene Litty, 2026.

Fig. 11. Christine Gironcoli, Ohne Titel (Mönch), 2025. Installation view, Terminal Piece, mumok, Vienna. Photograph: Patrizia Helene Litty, 2026.

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What shapes an image before we can even see it? Act 4 returns to the tension between possibility and given conditions, asking how perception, material, memory and context already influence what can emerge. The works suggest that an image is never completely open or neutral; it develops within structures that both limit and enable what becomes visible.

Fig. 12. Nina Porter, installation view, Act 4, Terminal Piece, mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna, 2026. Photograph: Patrizia Helene Litty, 2026.

The ground floor is both the beginning and the end of this comprehensive exhibition. Anna Viebrock created this part in a theatrical tradition. Instead of the usual white cube experience, visitors experience a dynamic range of spaces. Disorientating but an exciting engagement with the museum collection that challenges perceived ideas of a museum display.

Solo Exhibition | STEVENSON, Cape Town | 4 July – 15 August 2026

Filmed during the opening of the exhibition, this short film moves through the gallery space and the works on view.

In conversation, Mawande Ka Zenzile spoke about painting as a form of meditation: a practice of waiting until the mind becomes quiet enough to be passed through, or momentarily left behind. His process depends on this state of heightened presence, where painting is not forced into being, but allowed to emerge from attention, stillness and the immediacy of the moment. The exhibition extends this meditative process into a body of work where line, colour and material become pathways through memory, ancestry, African and isiXhosa knowledge systems, and other ways of knowing.

Art Formes, Cape Town,

A GROUP EXHIBITION 

16.04.26 – 09.06.26

Notes from a walkabout.

I attended the opening of Penny Siopis’s solo exhibition Love in a Turning World at STEVENSON, Cape Town, on 7 February 2026. The gallery describes it as Siopis’s first exhibition with STEVENSON since her acclaimed retrospective For Dear Life at the National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens (EMST) in 2024/25 (STEVENSON, 2026).

STEVENSON’s framing is sharp: love is advanced not as a sentimental pictorial subject but as a position — a disposition — a way of being in relation to others, to the non-human, and to a world experienced as unstable and in flux (STEVENSON, 2026). Although the exhibition carries recurring suggestions of embracing figures and birth, the emphasis is on love as an orientation rather than illustration. The title’s “turning” operates across multiple registers, signalling both the current global and psychological condition of upheaval and the internal logic of Siopis’s method — a practice of transformation in which form, meaning, and emotion remain open rather than fixed (STEVENSON, 2026).

Siopis is, quite simply, one of the most talented and challenging visual artists working in and beyond South Africa (Olivier, 2014). It was a genuine honour to encounter her at the opening and to experience her generosity at close range: she shares knowledge, technical detail, and philosophical reflection in her characteristic smiling, easy manner — never performative, always precise.

The exhibition is comprehensive, spanning paintings on canvas and paper, sculptures, and video works. The moment I stepped off the main road in Woodstock and into the gallery, I felt enclosed by another world — not an escape so much as a proposition: a vision of what could still be possible in a future world shaped by colour, trust, and joy. The vibrancy of the palette, the confidence of the forms, and the sheer scale of the works transported me into a different register of attention. I found myself reluctantly letting go of that state as I stepped back outside into ordinary reality.

STEVENSON is, of course, known for staging extraordinary exhibitions, but this one felt unusually direct in its impact — almost like a needed dose: this is what I need right now — joy. Thank you for offering the public this beautiful opportunity.

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Below please find some animated/video impressions of the show and the opening event.

References

• Olivier, G. (ed.) (2014) Penny Siopis: Time and Again. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. 
• STEVENSON (2026) ‘Penny Siopis: Love in a Turning World’. STEVENSON, Cape Town (exhibition page). 
• National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens (EMST) (2024–2025) ‘Penny Siopis: For Dear Life. A Retrospective’ .

I’m writing this in my own register: direct, image-led, a little impatient with pretence, and worried about what gets lost when culture accelerates faster than people can metabolise it. I don’t want to simplify the issues we face, but I also don’t want to keep rewarding a tone of permanent emergency that leaves audiences numb, ashamed, or switched off.

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Luís M.S. Santos’s debut South African solo exhibition, 

menino, não fala política (“kid, don’t talk politics”),

runs at RESERVOIR in Cape Town

from October 31 to December 12, 2025.

The show features sculptures, installations, and drawings that explore the, fragility of democracy in Mozambique using, materials like glazed ceramic feet, rusted iron, and wood. 

The idea for this article emerged from an evening of conversation and connection. On 31 October, I attended the opening of menino, não fala política, a solo exhibition by Luis M. S. Santos at Reservoir Gallery, Cape Town. I spoke with gallery co-founder Heinrich Groenewald about the gallery’s background and vision, and later with Santos himself about the conceptual and political context of his work. What began as a casual exchange quickly unfolded into a reflection on how artistic dialogue and professional networks shape not only our understanding of contemporary practice but also the research paths we follow.

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