Ukraine’s Struggle For Culture: Russian Colonial War and European Decolonisation

Vasyl Cherepanyn (Ukraine) is Head of the Visual Culture Research Center (VCRC), an institution he cofounded in Kyiv in 2008 as a platform for collaboration among academic, artistic, and activist communities. VCRC is the organiser of the Kyiv Biennial and a founding member of the East Europe Biennial Alliance. Cherepanyn holds a PhD in philosophy and has lectured at several universities, both in Kyiv and other cities in Europe. He curated The European International (Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam, 2018), Hybrid Peace (Stroom, The Hague, 2019), and Armed Democracy (2nd edition of Biennale Warszawa, 2022), among others.

Eszter Szakács is a curator and researcher. She is invested in grassroots art instituting, infrastructure-building, and the politics of organising. She practices these as a curatorial team member of the grassroots initiative OFF-Biennale Budapest, with whom she acted as a lumbung member at documenta fifteen (2022), and was a part of the likewise grassroots East Europe Biennial Alliance team that collectively curated the Kyiv Biennial in 2021. Eszter is also theorising from her practice as a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Amsterdam.

Remco Torenbosch (RA 18/19) is an artist and researcher whose practice is based on issues within the realm of political economics. His work addresses a wide range of topics, including the economic governance by political systems, the interrelationships among individuals, governments, and public policy, and the complex dynamics of the global economy. His work has been exhibited at: Kunsthaus Zurich, Victoria and Albert Museum London, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Kunsthalle Wien, De Appel Amsterdam, GAMeC Bergamo, among others. In 2013 he was nominated for the Prix de Rome.

Since 2018, Milena Bonilla (RA 09/10) and Ana María Gómez López (RA 17/18), Amsterdam-based artists from Colombia, have carried out artworks and interventions related to anniversaries of historical events such as the Dutch Red Week and the Paris Commune. Their collaborative work takes sites and artifacts as the starting point for creating transhistorical associations on these events, examining their effects in the present while also reconfiguring interpretations of their past. Several of their initiatives have been made in association with the Rijksakademie. In 2020-2021, both were selected as artists-in-residence at the International Institute for Social History for the project 'A Bundle of Silences (1870)', also with the support of the Rijksakademie.