How Russia and Israel’s Venice Biennale participation is causing big problems
The jury has resigned, EU funding has been cut, there’s no Golden Lion prize. One curator says: ‘You can’t be neutral when people are dying’
The Venice Biennale previewed its 61st and most chaotic edition ever early this week, just days after the unprecedented resignation of its jury over the participation of Israel and Russia undermined the structure of the world’s oldest contemporary art exhibition.
Tensions were evident as Ukrainian artists stood by a truck that had brought a statue of an origami deer from their country’s war-ravaged eastern front to the biennale’s storied Giardini. Just metres away, a handful of participants in the Russian Pavilion danced to house music played by an Argentine DJ.
At the same time, a group of Palestinians marched through the Giardini wearing the names of artists who have been killed in Gaza. More protests were expected as the preview week continues.
Few inside the biennale were surprised that global politics were spilling over into the international art exhibition, putting new pressure on its structure of national pavilions alongside a curated exhibition and raising old questions: is the representation of nations outmoded in a globalised system where artists often operate internationally, and does it give states an undue platform for propaganda?
“I think what has been contested very much is the existence of the nation state within the space of the exhibition,” says Marie Helene Pereira, one of the five curators of the main exhibition, “In Minor Keys”, who have taken up the mantle of the late curator Koyo Kouoh.
“We can see how much that can bring tension, especially in the midst of the political chaos [in which] we find ourselves. It’s important to be able to rethink structure, rethink institutions, in a way that allows for them to cater more to artists and artmaking.”