The 14th Berlin Biennale has its title — and its compass. "Central Europe Eastern Time," announced this week for the edition curated by Ukrainian curator Vasyl Cherepanyn, will run from June 5 to September 12, 2027, with an opening on the evening of June 4.

The title proposes what the Biennale calls a new reading of Berlin from the East: a perspective on Europe shaped by the regions, experiences and societal realities long pushed to the margins of the European narrative. Cherepanyn frames the title as a navigation tool and instrument of orientation — a chronotope in which space and time are inseparable, pointing to how shifting political, economic and ideological systems define today's conditions of human coexistence. The geography it claims stretches from the Balkans to the Baltics, from Central Europe to the South Caucasus and beyond.

Cherepanyn, born in Ivano-Frankivsk and based in Berlin, is cofounder and head of the Visual Culture Research Center, which organizes the Kyiv Biennial, and a founding member of the East Europe Biennial Alliance. His practice has focused on the post-Soviet condition of Eastern Europe, and he has described the Biennale as an opportunity to build a publicness defined not just artistically but out of social-political necessity — shaped, he has said, by experience working in Ukraine as Russia's war confronts Europe with urgent questions.

Venues include the KW Institute for Contemporary Art — the Biennale's institutional home since 1998 — and the Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart. The appointment of an Eastern-Europe-focused curator for one of the continent's flagship exhibitions is itself a statement: fourteen editions in, Berlin is being asked to locate itself not at the center of Europe, but in its east.