Now, Kiev has the sort of prestigious, wealthy, oligarch-funded venues where you would expect such an event to be held, and indeed which have held biennials here before — Arsenal, a large space in a neoclassical Tsarist barracks, or the Pinchuk Art Centre, a typical oligarch’s gallery that specialises in contemporary art. The reason why it’s taking place mainly in a disused, if architecturally intriguing Brezhnev-era shopping mall and 15 other motley venues is the fact that the event had no major source of state or private funding. So the organisers, the Visual Culture Research Centre, a left-leaning group formerly asssociated with (until expelled from) the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, improvised, with the actual curation provided by Austrians Georg Schöllhammer and Hedwig Saxenhuber.

The result is the School of Kyiv, where essentially the city itself becomes the object of the biennial. A series of “schools” (on “image and evidence”, “the displaced”, “realism”, “abducted Europe”, and “landscape”, in which — full disclosure — the present writer took part) take place around the city, with a bizarrely eclectic programme including figures of the neo-conservative right and others on the Marxist left, though seldom at the same time. But the city itself, and the route through it that the venues provide, is the best school, leading you through its grand spaces, housing estates, ex-industrial wastes and “aspirational” enclaves, to institutions where an A4 piece of paper with the biennial’s logo (or not) indicates its often seemingly reluctant participation.