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The invited artists have either a relationship to previous editions of the biennial or personal experiences with displacement and war. The curators avoided totalising statements and instead chose to create a web of undercurrents about war, oppression and violence, archives of destroyed sites, and the history of Ukraine through their selection of artworks. The main Viennese exhibition was co-organised by the team of the Kyiv Biennial and Tranzit.at and was curated by Georg Schöllhammer, Hedwig Saxenhuber, and Serge Klymko, who chose to focus on the biennale as a connecting point between artists, Ukraine, and foreign institutions. The rest of the deceptively serene city seemed entirely unaware that it was hosting an exhibition filled with timely reflections on displacement and solidarity. A dark undertone accompanied the small talk and the catching up: “have you heard about the hospital?” as rumours circulated about the most recent violence in Gaza. The biennial acted as a reunion point for such artists as well as the works of those who are currently engaged in military service and therefore could not be in attendance one such work is a drawing on paper by Ukrainian artist and soldier Bohdan Bunchak, who made his drawing from the hospital after being injured while on duty. The audience came from the new diasporic cultural scene that has left Ukraine for a new life in Austria, Germany, or other countries abroad.

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On the night of the opening, the courtyard in front of Atelier Augarten, the main site for the Vienna edition of the biennale, was full of young artists, curators, and visitors to the exhibition, many of whom were not speaking German, but Ukrainian. While the main exhibition takes place in Vienna, a programme of exhibitions and events runs simultaneously in Kyiv, Uzhgorod, Warsaw, Berlin, and other cities, following the most common routes taken by Ukrainian cultural workers. The 5 th edition is the first to take place away from Kyiv, forcibly displaced by two years of the ongoing full-scale Russian invasion. The main exhibition of the Kyiv Biennial opened on 17 October, a calm Viennese Tuesday evening, and runs through 17 December 2023.