Vasyl Cherepanyn

Curator of the 14th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art

Vasyl Cherepanyn was born in 1980 in Ivano-Frankivsk in Ukraine, and currently lives in Berlin. Cherepanyn is the curator of the 14th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, which will take place in the summer of 2027. He holds a PhD in philosophy and has lectured at various universities, including the Cultural Studies Department of the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, the Institute for Advanced Studies of the Political Critique in Warsaw, University of Helsinki, European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), and the Krupp Wissenschaftskolleg Greifswald of the Greifswald University. In 2008, he co-founded the Visual Culture Research Center (VCRC), the institutional organizer of the Kyiv Biennial and a founding member of the East Europe Biennial Alliance (EEBA). Cherepanyn is part of the curatorial team of the Kyiv Biennial, which will conclude with a further chapter at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in 2026 and was previously presented at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, M HKA – Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, Dnipro Center for Contemporary Culture, Dovzhenko Centre in Kyiv, and Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz. In 2024, he co-curated Kyiv Perennial at Between Bridges, neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst (nGbK), and Prater Galerie in Berlin. He also co-organized iterations of the Kyiv Biennial such as Allied (2021), Black Cloud (2019), The Kyiv International (2017), or The School of Kyiv (2015) and curated the public program Armed Democracy at the Biennale Warszawa (2022), the exhibition Hybrid Peace at Stroom Den Haag (2019), The European International at Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam (2018), and Global Protest at the Open University of Maidan (2013), among others. He edited publications such as Society of the Frontline: A Guidebook of Kyiv Perennial (nGbK, 2025), ’68 NOW (Archive Books, 2019), and Guidebook of the Kyiv International (Medusa Books, 2018), and was the co-editor of the Ukrainian edition of the magazine Political Critique from 2011 to 2014.

Vasyl Cherepanyn visited Vienna on a research trip in April 2026.

Vasyl Cherepanyn, curator of the 14th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art. Photo: Diana Pfammatter