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The Venice Biennale, which runs this year from April 20 to November 24, is one of the world’s most prestigious international art shows. It is also held alongside the Documenta in the German city of Kassel.

The lagoon city will once again become the center of the international art world in the coming weeks and months. Over 800,000 art lovers made a pilgrimage to the previous Biennale held two years ago, and two-thirds came from abroad, a new record.

Israeli pavilion to remain closed in protest

The Israel-Hamas war is having a direct impact on the prestigious art show. 

A collective of pro-Palestinian activists, the “Art Not Genocide Alliance” or ANGA for short, had been calling for the exclusion of Israel from this year’s Biennale amid the conflict. 

In an open letter, the activists criticized Israel for its military action in the Gaza Strip — which the collective calls a “genocide” against the Palestinians.

The open letter condemns the “double standards” of Biennale organizers, noting that they remained silent on the situation in the Middle East while they had condemned Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine two years earlier.  According to the alliance, more than 23,750 people have signed the call so far, including US photographer Nan Goldin.

The Biennale rejected the calls for a boycott. The curators had already decided on the concept and participants of the central Biennale exhibition long before the Hamas terror attack on October 7 that prompted Israel’s retaliation in the Gaza Strip.  

But now the doors to the Israeli pavilion will stay closed anyway. The exhibition’s featured artist, Ruth Patir, an Israeli born in New York in 1984, announced in a statement on Tuesday that the show will only open “when a cease-fire and hostage release agreement is reached.”

“The decision by the artist and curators is not to cancel themselves nor the exhibition; rather, they choose to take a stance in solidarity with the families of the hostages and the large community in Israel who is calling for change,” the statement on Patir’s website adds.

Patir’s exhibition, “M/otherLand,” features a video installation of ancient museum figurines representing “broken women” who “come to life and take part in a procession, in a shared public expression of grief, sorrow, and rage. The camera’s point of view is that of a bystander or a witness to the scene, thereby claiming a subjective, embodied take on world events.”

Israel has had its own national pavilion in Venice since 1950.

Russia’s pavilion to remain empty again

Meanwhile, the Russian pavilion will once again remain empty.

The Biennale did not officially exclude Russia, but after the country’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the artists and curators selected for the Russian pavilion resigned from participating under the national banner.

Ukraine is participating through a group exhibition titled “Net Making.”

‘Foreigners Everywhere’

Titled “Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere,” the main exhibition is curated by the Brazilian Adriano Pedrosa, who becomes the Venice Art Biennale’s first artistic director born and based in the Global South. The artistic director aims to show art from the Global South’s less privileged and less industrialized regions.

Pedrosa’s “primary focus is thus artists who are themselves foreigners, immigrants, expatriates, diasporic, émigrés, exiled or refugees,” he said in a statement. The exhibition extends across the Giardini park, the historic shipyard halls known as Arsenale and other art locations in the lagoon city.

The slogan itself is inspired by a work by a Parisian artist collective called Claire Fontaine, who had created different versions of the neon sign in 53 different languages. They now light up the Arsenale.

The international art show features 330 artists, with 88 countries presenting their own exhibitions. Most of them are showing their works in the Arsenale, without their own exhibition hall.

This year, four countries will participate for the first time at the Venice event: Benin, Ethiopia, Tanzania and Timor Leste. Nicaragua, Panama and Senegal will also participate with their own national pavilions for the first time.

African voices at the Art Biennale

The African continent, in particular, has been strengthening its presence at the world’s oldest art show. Ghana and Madagascar participated for the first time in 2019; Uganda, Cameroon and Namibia followed in 2022.

Based on the theme “Everything Precious is Fragile,” Benin’s pavilion features the works of artists Chloe Quenum, Moufouli Bello, Ishola Akpo and Romuald Hazoume. It is organized by Nigerian curator and critic Azu Nwagbogu, who is also the founder and director of the Lagos Photo Festival and the African Artists’ Foundation (AAF), a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting contemporary African art worldwide.

Among the foundation’s success stories is Romuald Hazoume. The now 62-year-old Yoruba artist and sculptor had already gained acclaim through his participation at Documenta 12 in Kassel in 2007, where he presented an impressive installation commenting on flight, expulsion and the loss of home.

Through Benin’s pavilion, curator Nwagbogu also wants to spark a new perspective on the decolonization of art, he told journalists ahead of the exhibition. Beyond the restitution of objects, he also wants to promote the “restitution of knowledge.” With the help of a “library of resistance,” he aims to give voice to women on topics such as African identity, ecology and science.

Does he feel that African voices are sufficiently represented in Venice? “I would like to see many more,” Nwagbogu told DW. “More importantly, I would like to see more deep cultural infrastructure built and supported on the [European] continent and more support for those impressive events we have already built across Africa.”

Germany’s multicultural approach

Among the 28 permanent country pavilions in the Giardini Park, the German pavilion’s program opens with a presentation by Berlin theater director Ersan Mondtag and Israeli artist Yael Bartana.

Under the title “Thresholds,” they offer an exploration of the past and the future inspired by various artistic concepts. The curator this year, after Yilmaz Dziewior in 2022, is the Istanbul-born architect and co-director of the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Cagla Ilk. Referring to the title of the show, she explained that on the threshold, “Nothing is certain.”

The pope expected at the event

The Vatican offers one of the attention-grabbing shows this year: It is placing its pavilion in the women’s prison in Venice. Inmates accompany visitors on an art itinerary through the prison.

Pope Francis also wants to visit the pavilion. He would be the first pontiff to date to visit the Venice Biennale.

This article was originally written in German.

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Originally a convent dating to the 13th century, and once a reformatory for prostitutes, the Giudecca women’s prison, set on an island in the Venetian lagoon, will this summer perform a quite different role: as the official pavilion for the Vatican at this year’s Venice Biennale.

Pope Francis is due to attend on 28 April – the first pontifical visit to the Biennale since it was founded in 1895. In the women’s prison he will see a work by Maurizio Cattelan, who notoriously created a hyper-real sculpture in 1999 depicting Pope John Paul II struck down by a meteorite.

For this exhibition, however, the Italian-born artist is contributing a work to be displayed on the facade of the prison chapel. Referencing Andrea Mantegna’s painting Lamentation Over the Dead Christ, it is a large-scale photograph of his own dirty, dusty feet.

Leading one of the first tours around the prison, which can be booked by members of the public, were three inmates, dressed in striking uniforms of navy and white that they had designed and made in the prison’s workshops. They introduced themselves only by their first names – Silvia, Emanuela and Paola.

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After an introduction to the prison, Emanuela, a middle-aged woman with neat jewellery and a confident manner, took the group through to the first venue for art: the staff bar, which, with its bottles of Select and Aperol, could have been any bar in the city, albeit with somewhat cheaper price points.

On the walls are displayed radical poster works by Corita Kent, with graphic messages protesting against war and violence. Kent, who died in 1986 and is the only deceased artist featured in the show, spent part of her life as a nun.

Silvia took the lead as guests entered a long, narrow walkway between the prison buildings and its outer walls. The sides are lined with glazed lava stone slabs, painted by the artist Simone Fattal with excerpts of poems written by the prisoners. “Our feelings are written here; a piece of us is written on these works of art,” said Emanuela. On the end wall of the walkway, below a lookout post, was a work by Claire Fontaine, a Palermo-based art collective. Depicting a large eye with a stroke through it, it conveyed “the blindness of society”, said Paola, “what people don’t look at and what they don’t want to see”.

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The tour continued past a large, lush vegetable garden thick with fruit trees and rows of artichoke plants. Working here, said Emanuela, “we can dream of other things; we can almost forget we are in prison”. The next stop was a wide open courtyard. A few inmates clustered beside a medieval well looked on as Emanuela explained a second Claire Fontaine work, a large neon text piece fixed to one of the walls reading: “Siamo con voi nella notte” – “We are with you in the night” – “which speaks to us as a message of solidarity from the people outside,” she said.

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The tour then trooped through the visitors’ room, to a space in which a short film by the artist Marco Perego and his wife, the actor Zoë Saldaña, was being shown. Saldaña, who starred in James Cameron’s Avatar films, acted alongside inmates in a narrative about a prisoner on the day of her release. Describing the process, she saidthe work was meant “not so much like a documentary that has to be truthful – instead we encouraged [the inmates] to make a piece of art with us”.

The pavilion was commissioned by Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça, who runs the Vatican’s dicastery for culture and education. The co-curators Bruno Racine and Chiara Parisi took on the Vatican pavilion “on the basis of perfect trust with the cardinal, who is himself a renowned poet”, said Racine, a former director of the National Library of France. “He understands the psychology of an artist and the desire for autonomy and not to be subject to the influence of ideas from outside.”

Asked whether she was a Roman Catholic, one of the artists involved in the project, the French hip-hop choreographer Bintou Dembélé, laughed. “My religion is the street,” she said.

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