The Kyiv Biennial is a nomadic, international project that interweaves artistic, political, and social issues. A Bird That Cannot Land, its chapter at KW, takes shape as an extensive live and discursive program and a large-scale exhibition spanning the entire building, contributing to the biennial’s reflections through contemporary art, sound, and exchange. For its chapter at KW, curated by the institution’s curatorial team under the leadership of Sofie Krogh Christensen, it quickly became clear that the Berlin iteration should engage with the city itself and its diasporic communities. I curated the live program with the support of Nikolas Brummer, Live Assistant Curator, that brings together around 15 artistic positions from Berlin’s diasporic landscape and beyond, spanning Southwest Asia, the Mediterranean, Eastern Europe, and the Balkans. In light of ongoing wars and systemic instability, A Bird That Cannot Land conceives exile in and from the world as a defining condition of contemporary life. Right now, when the continuity of language, meaning, and shared experience is fractured in many places, KW provides a platform for the local diaspora with global concerns to engage in dialogue and deep listening. Music and listening create forms of connection that can hold complexity, contradiction, and difference without reducing them to a single narrative.

The diversity of the live program is less about musical genres than about different ways of listening. What we hope emerges is a sense of curiosity and openness. A concert, a listening session, and an open rehearsal each produce a different relationship between artists and audiences, different forms of attention, and different degrees of proximity. Polyphony became an important concept while developing the program. It appears through choral practices, vocal traditions, and collective forms of music-making, but also as a way of thinking about coexistence. Rather than presenting a single narrative, the program brings together multiple histories, temporalities, and perspectives. What we hope audiences experience is not consensus, but the possibility of inhabiting complexity together through listening.

This connection runs through the program in different ways. During the Concert Week 8–11 July 2026, which transforms KW’s main hall into a space for live music, audiences encounter artists whose work is deeply shaped by personal and collective histories. Abdullah Miniawy, for example, draws on poetry and Sufi traditions, while Ihor Tsymbrovsky, an iconic figure of Ukrainian independent music, creates intensely intimate compositions that resonate with questions of memory, loss, and cultural continuity. In these performances, political realities are not addressed as abstract themes but emerge through voice, presence, and affect.

Meanwhile, the listening sessions, organized in collaboration with Radio Refuge Worldwide, approach this relationship from a different perspective. For example, on 3 September 2026, Fehras Publishing Practices revisits the music of Fairuz through newspapers, magazines, and archival recordings from the 1960s.  On one level, the session is deeply emotional. Fairuz occupies a unique place in the cultural memory of the Arab world, and her music continues to carry strong personal and collective associations across generations. At the same time, the session demonstrates that archives are never neutral. Preserving, collecting, and revisiting cultural material is inherently political because it shapes what is remembered, what is forgotten, and how histories are constructed. What we find compelling about Fehras’ work is that it brings these dimensions together. Music becomes both an emotional experience and a way of understanding larger political and cultural transformations.

For me, listening becomes political when it allows us to perceive structures that often remain abstract or invisible. A strong example is Nazanin Noori’s performance A LETTER TO EUROPE, which premieres on 12 July as part of the Concert Week. Conceived as a spoken-word opera based on a poem by Athena Farrokhzad, the work addresses migration, borders, and displacement through a combination of spoken word, classical Iranian singing, percussion, and electronics. The work approaches Europe not as a fixed geographical entity, but as a contested political and historical construct. Drawing on the myth of Europa and unfolding in reference to a wedding ceremony, the performance creates a space in which questions of belonging, exclusion, coercion, and movement can be felt as much as they are understood.

More broadly, many works in the program suggest that listening is never neutral. It shapes whose voices are heard, which histories become audible, and how we relate to experiences beyond our own. In that sense, listening can become a form of political perception.

Berlin is not simply the setting for the program, it is one of its conditions. Many of the artists and communities involved live and work here, bringing with them different languages, musical traditions, and cultural histories. What interested us was not presenting these practices as separate cultural identities, but creating a space where they could enter into dialogue with one another. This allows for unexpected resonances to emerge between experiences that might otherwise remain disconnected. In that sense, the city becomes a space where local and translocal histories intersect and continue to evolve.

For example, during Berlin Art Week, the live program concludes with a newly commissioned performance by LABOUR, the Berlin-based artist duo Farahnaz Hatam and Colin Hacklander, developed in close collaboration with local performers with diasporic experiences and an artist in Iran. Activating the architecture of KW through a dispersed sonic dramaturgy, the work explores listening as a collective and spatial experience, bringing many of the program’s central concerns, like the negotiation of shared space, into the building itself.

Accessibility was important from the beginning, although I think it extends beyond ticket pricing. While some events are free and others intentionally remain very affordable, the broader question was how to create multiple entry points into the program. This is also why process-based formats became so important. The open rehearsals are not simply opportunities for audiences to observe artistic production, they are part of a broader effort to provide artists and communities with time and space to work together. In a city where cultural infrastructure and rehearsal space are becoming increasingly scarce, supporting these collective processes feels particularly meaningful.

Additionally, KW offers a Free Thursday with longer opening hours and free admission to the exhibitions once a month, to which we also add special acts with our live-program. We hope audiences feel comfortable entering the program without prior knowledge or expertise. Whether someone joins a concert, a listening session, or an open rehearsal by chance, hopefully they encounter listening as a shared practice, one that can foster curiosity, attention, and unexpected connections.