Image: KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin
KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin will host the Kyiv Biennial Konzertwoche, a week-long live program running from July 8 to July 11, 2026 in the institution’s main hall. The series brings concerts and performances into dialogue with Berlin’s diasporic communities and translocal artistic practices, with KW framing the program around the political and emotional force of music, as well as diverse sonic practices and vocal traditions.
The concert week is presented as part of Kyiv Biennial – A Bird That Cannot Land, a larger project shown at KW through September 13, 2026. KW says the live program unfolds in multiple formats and centers a week of events in the Haupthalle, where concerts on the same day are programmed as double bills. The institution recommends combined tickets for those attending both performances on a single evening.
The opening night on July 8 pairs Heinali and Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko with Abdullah Miniawy. Heinali and Saienko present Гільдеґарда (Hildegard), a collaborative work based on music by Hildegard von Bingen. KW describes the performance as moving between early music, modular synthesis and vocal practice, with slowed-down renditions of two compositions by Hildegard von Bingen and sonic structures that draw on Ukrainian folk singing. The same evening, Miniawy performs The evens, Rahma, a concert that explores the temporal and expressive qualities of breath and wind through the interplay of voice and instruments.
On July 9, Nour Sokhon presents Beirut Birds (طيور بيروت), a live performance shaped by her ongoing research into migration, displacement and recurring instability in Lebanon. Later that night, Wafaa Saied performs with her band, weaving traditional songs with personal and collective storytelling. KW says the concert brings together music and oral history to explore cultural resilience.
The final two evenings continue the focus on memory, voice and movement across borders. On July 10, Katarina Gryvul presents SPOMYN, which KW identifies as meaning “recollection,” as a live performance addressing memory’s fragile, fractured nature. That same evening, Ihor Tsymbrovsky appears in a rare live performance featuring selected works from a musical catalogue spanning more than three decades, with compositions for voice, piano and organ. The week concludes on July 11 with the Berlin premiere of Nazanin Noori’s A LETTER TO EUROPE, a spoken-word opera based on a poem by Athena Farrokhzad that addresses migration, borders and displacement in contemporary Europe.
The program matters beyond Berlin because it places live performance at the center of a biennial project that is explicitly translocal in outlook. Rather than treating concert form as separate from contemporary art discourse, KW uses the week to connect music, oral history, memory and migration to current questions shaping artistic production across Europe and beyond. In a moment when biennials and art institutions are increasingly asked to address mobility, war, diaspora and the circulation of cultural forms, KW’s Kyiv Biennial Concert Week positions the live event as both an artistic format and a site of political resonance.
