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Ohn Tuesday, the Russian stage at the Venice Biennale was full of action. Several pallets, filled with prosecco and several cases of Gordon’s English gin, were brought out. Inside, Ensemble Toloka, a group of “young actors and researchers of real Russian music”, were singing, balalaikas at their feet, the first in the program of performances that took place in the preview days of the art festival.
When I sent a few seconds of video of this to my friend, a close watcher and critic of Russia who lived there until recently, the answer came quickly, a brief assessment: “National evils to hide their war crimes.” Later, I saw DJs on the steps and a few people dancing. At the same time, the center of the city Kramatorsk in eastern Ukraine was bombed in the afternoon—five dead.
You have to give it to Russia. It had a lot to celebrate with prosecco. After a break from 2022, it returned to the most famous festival in the world, where a large central exhibition organized by an invited curator is accompanied by many exhibitions made by countries in the national arenas. And everyone is talking about it. Even protests – like A beautiful intervention by Pussy Riot Wednesday – they force a conversation.
President of the Biennale, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco – the controversial intellectual appointed by the government of Giorgia Meloni – has supported the return of Russia, as well as the continued presence of Israel, despite several appeals and open letters, some of which also wanted withdrawal from the US. The only thing he can stop, he has he saidand any restriction on participation. The process is neutral, but the letters published by La Repubblica seem to show that the biennale management is helping the Russian participants in trying to get visas, and the Commissioner of the forum, Anastasia Karneeva, has thanked “our Italian friends” in a social media post. Meanwhile, the European Commission is search if sanctions have been violated and Meloni, although distancing himself from the position of Buttafuoco, has not intervened.
Opposing the inclusion of Russia, there was no art minister present at the opening of the British gallery, this year full of paintings and sounds. Lubina Himid. In contrast, the ministers of culture of Ukraine, Poland, Moldova and the Baltic states – which live near Russia – had more evidence and had more to say. At the meeting I attended on Wednesday, the Minister of Culture of Poland, Marta Cienkowska, said that “speaking the language of culture in order to end the reality of war” was “an old way of disseminating fake news”. Heidy Purga, Estonia’s culture minister, criticized the biennale for appearing to have “surrendered to the tyrant”.
The Biennale can often make you calm, as geopolitics is played out through technology, and the yachts of the very rich are a visible proof of the ideas far removed from those often created by artists within the gallery. But this edition has something of a different order to it: it feels like it’s about to collapse in on itself, rather than the global order it so rarely presents. The art director, Koyo Kouoh, died of cancer last year and left a place where his voice could have been spoken, he would have been. His legacy was a team of curators to complete his work in preparation for the central exhibition; and the court, which is in charge of selecting the artists and the courts that selected them.
At the end of April, the judges wrote the best place they wanted to work, among all the things that Buttafuoco insisted on: he printed the word He says that he “avoids thinking about countries whose leaders are being prosecuted by the International Court of Justice”. Without naming names, that means Russia and Israel. At the same time, they were forced to retract their statement, and were also threatened by an artist representing Israel. Their autonomy was compromised, their choice was to refuse or resign. In this situation, he took the only option he could – they quit their jobs.
Perhaps all this seems unnecessary – technical conflicts that have nothing to do with the future of countries and people. But it is very important – and for Israel and Russia. It would be easy for them not to leave, but every tribe insists on its existence, and without a little effort. Events such as the biennale provide legitimacy. He replaces the idea of a bomb and the death of civilians with an aura, as it may be, the throat singing of Tuvan, or the poetry of Paul Celan – although what Celan would have made to be strongly requested by the exhibition in this year’s Israel pavilion is anyone’s guess.
The Biennale has been presenting a selection of works by curators. It took many years from its foundation in 1895 for its current form – a central exhibition accompanying exhibitions in the national arena – to fully develop. Sometimes he has gone too far from the setup that is recognized today – in 1974, for example, the whole event was reconfigured as a one-month event in cooperation with Chile, and from then until the fall of the Berlin Wall, serious consideration was given to discarding the country’s demonstrations altogether, Clarissa Ricci, bienna historian at the University of Bienne, told the press.
Against this unstable history, Buttafuoco’s insistence on the biennale as “a place of peace in the name of art, culture, and artistic freedom” appears as neutral and as a direct space. But perhaps the most important thing to remember is that the design of the biennale that we recognize today was created in the 1930s, under the leadership of Mussolini, to be, says Ricci, “the focus of propaganda and to be at the center of Italian culture”. He said that for the fascists, encouraging different countries as much as possible to establish national forums became important. At that time, the event was called “Geneva for the arts”. How interesting, that Buttafuoco himself should say these words, when he called the biennale “a place that can be. was adopted as UN of Artfrom which no race can be separated”.
