M HKA presents: Homelands and Hinterlands
A group exhibition at M HKA for the Kyiv Biennial 2025
20 September 2025 – 11 January 2026
Featuring Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Davyd Chychkan, Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze, Mona Hatoum, Iman Issa, Mashid Mohadjerin, Ala Savashevich, Anna Zvyagintseva
Kyiv Biennial 2025 situates itself amidst the lived reality of war crimes, illegal occupations, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and the broader autocratic turn in global politics, including Russia's invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s brutal operation in Gaza. In reckoning with the injustices and atrocities being committed today, Kyiv Biennial 2025 reflects on failed solidarities and internationalisms. It does this across a zone described as Middle-East-Europe, a term that encompasses Central Eastern Europe, the former Soviet East and the Middle East.
The exhibition title, Homelands and Hinterlands, refers to the notion of ‘hinterland’, meaning the ‘lands behind’. Here, it applies to the areas surrounding former European colonies that are claimed by powerful countries. This conception involves recognising the economic, geographic, cultural and political significance of hinterlands in relation to the colonial centres that they resource. More specifically, the presentation at M HKA focuses on the notion of ‘erasure’, past and present: the erasure of people through dehumanisation, killing and crimes against humanity – the erasure of memory and of everyday life – the desire to erase the long shadow of 20th century ideologies – the erasure of images – the erasure of political plurality – or even the erasure of the technologies we depend on.
For several of the participating artists, the violence of war and oppression remains a defining context. By questioning the colonial relationship between fading European powers and their so-called peripheries outside the EU, Kyiv Biennial 2025 asserts that the fate of Western Europe is now being forged in its parallel relations with its eastern borderlands. The exhibition seeks to interconnect these ‘peripheries’ of Europe and reopen the experiences of Middle-East-Europe grounded in political complexities and historical entanglements. The artworks suggest the possibility that facing such destruction might also motivate us to find an emancipatory way out of the current conjuncture of obliteration.
The exhibition is curated by Vasyl Cherepanyn, Visual Culture Research Center / Kyiv Biennial and Nav Haq, Associate Director, M HKA
Kyiv Biennial 2025 is being held at multiple locations across Europe. M HKA presents an exhibition in parallel to the exhibition held at the newly opened Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (MSN). These iterations will be followed by two projects at the Dnipro Center for Contemporary Culture and the Dovzhenko Centre in Kyiv, with the last of the exhibitions taking place at the Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz.
M HKA’s participation in Kyiv Biennial 2025 also includes the project Networks and Infrastructures, organised by the Warsaw-based online journal MOST, which comprises an INBOX presentation on the 5th floor and a seminar on 24-26 October. Networks and Infrastructures has been made possible in partnership with the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, De Cinema and De Studio.