There is a particular kind of press release that tells you everything about an institution by what it refuses to say. Pietrangelo Buttafuoco's Biennale put one out last month, announcing that "in response to the communications and requests for participation from Countries, La Biennale di Venezia rejects any form of exclusion or censorship of culture and art." Translation: the Russian pavilion — closed since the week the tanks rolled into Kharkiv in 2022 — is reopening on 9 May. The Israeli pavilion is being quietly moved inside the Arsenale, pressed up against the main exhibition. And the late Koyo Kouoh's curatorial project, In Minor Keys, which she was finalising when she died on 10 May 2025, is about to be filed in by a commissioner's floor plan. Seventy-three of her artists wrote a letter. The Biennale answered with the word neutral, and neither the Italian state nor Brussels believes it.

The coverage is calling it a row. It is a soft-power doctrine.

What the Giardini's committee actually voted for, when it let the Russian Federation return and relocated Israel to within breathing distance of In Minor Keys, is a specific twenty-first-century doctrine: that a sanctioned state and a state the International Court of Justice is adjudicating for genocide can both buy cultural legitimacy by the square metre, provided the host is a Meloni-adjacent Italian presidency that wants to signal to Washington, Tel Aviv and Moscow at once. What the coverage is calling "a controversy" is the normal operating system of a cultural vehicle designed, from 1895, to move national prestige. The fight is not over whether the Biennale is political. That was settled in 1895. The fight is over whose politics the Arsenale now houses.

The Russian pavilion was never on "pause." It was on retainer.

For three Biennales — 2022, 2024, and until last month, 2026 — the Russian pavilion was treated in the Western press as a moral quarantine, a small victory for the rules-based order. It was nothing of the sort. The commissioner all along was Anastasia Karneeva, co-founder of the Moscow gallery Smart Art and, per Meduza's unsparing 11 March dossier, the daughter of Rostec deputy director Nikolai Volobuev — Rostec being the state conglomerate that builds Russia's missiles. The Kremlin's international cultural delegate, Mikhail Shvydkoy, stayed on record through the "pause." The pavilion was lent to Bolivia in 2024 as a diplomatic favour to a BRICS partner, not surrendered. When it reopens on 9 May with a 38-artist omnibus called The Tree Is Rooted in the Sky — a title quarried from Simone Weil, of all people — the through-line is perfectly intact. Art, as Pussy Riot put it in a statement to the Art Newspaper on 6 March, has become "part of Russia's military doctrine and an instrument of hybrid warfare."

That is a sentence Western editors did not want to sit with four years ago, when sanctioning culture looked like an easy win. They are having to sit with it now because the machinery never stopped running.

Brussels found its voice on Russia. On Israel it has not opened its mouth.

On 13 April, Henna Virkkunen and Glenn Micallef — respectively Executive Vice-President and Culture Commissioner at the European Commission — gave the Biennale 30 days to explain how the Russian pavilion complies with EU sanctions, or forfeit the €2 million grant routed through the Education and Culture Executive Agency for the 2028 edition. Euronews reported the letter the same day. Finland's Minister of Education and Culture Mari-Leena Talvitie announced on 17 April, per ARTnews, that Finnish political leadership will not attend opening week "as long as Russia's war of aggression in Ukraine continues." Italian Vice-Premier Matteo Salvini called the threat "vulgar blackmail." The choreography is familiar.

What is new, and what the Europe-first commentariat is not ready to narrate, is the counter-pressure. The Green MEP Angelo Bonelli put the inconsistency on the record in the same Euronews dispatch: the Commission "raises its voice" on Russia while remaining "silent" on Israel, despite — in his words — "the genocide perpetrated in Gaza and the more than 70,000 dead." The Palestinian health ministry's 18 April count, carried on Al Jazeera's Telegram feed the same day Buttafuoco was still defending his programme, put the figure at 72,549. Brussels is policing one soft-power vector and waving the other through. The Biennale did not invent that asymmetry. It is merely the most expensive room in which to stage it.

The 73 artists said out loud what the institution won't

On 13 March, seventy-three artists and curators participating in Kouoh's In Minor Keys sent a letter to Buttafuoco. Among the named signatories, reported by Artforum on 31 March: Alfredo Jaar, Walid Raad, Khalil Joreige, Gala Porras-Kim, Nina Katchadourian, Himali Singh Soin, and — crucially — three of the curators carrying out Kouoh's vision after her death: Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Rasha Salti, Rory Tsepayi. Their central objection, verbatim from the letter: "To insert the Israeli pavilion into spaces alongside the main exhibition, 'In Minor Keys,' conceived by Koyo Kouoh, intrudes upon and goes directly against Kouoh's curatorial vision."

Read carefully, that is not a moral complaint. It is an architectural one. The Israeli pavilion's permanent structure is in the Giardini; moving it into the Arsenale means the Biennale's management has physically embedded a state pavilion — one whose 2024 iteration by Ruth Patir was shuttered by the artist herself pending a Gaza ceasefire — inside the footprint of Kouoh's exhibition. Somebody's floor plan did that. Somebody signed off on it. "Radical solidarity," the curatorial framework Kouoh was developing before her death, does not survive that juxtaposition; the artists whose work was commissioned under it noticed that it would not survive, and they wrote it down. The Biennale responded, according to the ARTnews investigation by senior editor Alex Greenberger on 12 March, that it "rejects any form of exclusion or censorship." That answer does not address the question that was asked, which was about spatial complicity, not freedom of expression. You do not protect freedom of expression by putting the expression under a state pavilion's shadow.

I have watched enough Biennales to know how this ends if left alone. The pavilion opens. The critics review it. A Guardian features writer files 1,400 words about "powerful confrontations." The political economy of the arrangement — who paid for the move, who benefits from the prestige, whose human-rights file gets laundered by proximity to the avant-garde — gets handled on page four of The Art Newspaper and nowhere else. Vittoria Martini, the Venetian art historian quoted in Greenberger's piece, noted the Italian press once called the Biennale "the UN of the arts." It never was. The 1974 edition, Libertà al Cile, openly declared itself antifascist. The 2022 edition hosted Piazza Ucraina, a solidarity space. Biennale president Roberto Cicutto, cited in the same article, conceded such moments are "not unique." Invoking neutrality in 2026 is not naïve. It is load-bearing cynicism.

Simone Weil, hijacked; the boycott, live

The Russian project's title — The Tree Is Rooted in the Sky — is taken from the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil, whose 1943 notebooks contain the line. Weil spent the last year of her life starving herself in solidarity with occupied France and died in Ashford, Kent, at thirty-four. To use her as the ornamental banner over a pavilion run by the commissioner-daughter of a Rostec executive is the single most bankrupt citation in the 2026 art calendar — and nothing in the Russian programme's press materials suggests anyone involved finds that funny. The artist Marina Koldobskaya, quoted in Meduza, put the artistic objection plainly: "a group of fifty people doesn't make an artistic statement." It makes a delegation. That is the point. Delegations, unlike artworks, do not have to say anything coherent; they simply have to be present.

The boycott is now being fought on the one piece of terrain the Biennale cannot finesse: its own artists. Over six thousand people have signed the Art Not Genocide Alliance's letter published in Hyperallergic on 27 February, which quotes the British artist Tai Shani's May 2022 Art Review piece — "the only meaningful action artists have in the face of huge networks of power and systemic injustice is the right of refusal." Twenty-two European politicians, led by Latvia, signed a separate open letter in March warning of "state-directed cultural diplomacy." Ukraine's foreign ministry called the Russian pavilion a potential "stage for whitewashing the war crimes that Russia commits daily." The Biennale's answer, once again, is that it is a "neutral body" that "accepts applications from any nation recognised in Italy." That is the sentence of an institution that has already made its choice and is hoping the architecture will make it for everyone else.

Venice opens on 9 May. By then, Brussels will either have cut the grant or blinked; the Arsenale's floor plan will either have been redrawn or defended; the 73 will have decided, individually, whether to hang their work alongside a relocated state pavilion whose government is under ICJ review. None of those decisions will be made by artists in the abstract. They will be made on a map, in a room, with a budget. That is culture as foreign policy — the only kind that has ever actually existed at the Giardini. The question now is not whether the Biennale is neutral. It is whether the people still calling it that are being paid to.

Sources

• Alex Greenberger, "The Venice Biennale Claims It's Neutral—But No Art Exhibition Ever Is," ARTnews, 12 March 2026. https://www.artnews.com/feature/venice-biennale-neutrality-national-pavilions-russia-israel-1234777235/
• Karen Archey et al., "Participating Artists and Curators Push Back on Venice Biennale's Relocation of Israeli Pavilion," Artforum, 31 March 2026. https://www.artforum.com/news/73-artists-protest-venice-biennale-israeli-pavilion-1234746685/
• "Reopening of the Russian pavilion at the Venice Biennale: EU threatens to cut funding," Euronews Culture, 13 April 2026. https://www.euronews.com/culture/2026/04/13/reopening-of-the-russian-pavilion-at-the-venice-biennale-eu-threatens-to-cut-funding
• "Finland Pulls Back Venice Biennale Presence Over Return of Russian Pavilion," ARTnews, 17 April 2026. https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/finland-venice-biennale-russia-pavilion-boycott-1234781822/
• "Russia's return to the Venice Biennale has triggered backlash and a threat to pull EU funding," Meduza, 11 March 2026. https://meduza.io/en/feature/2026/03/11/russia-s-return-to-the-venice-biennale-has-triggered-backlash-and-a-threat-to-pull-e-u-funding-meduza-explains-how-the-forum-was-designed-for-soft-power-from-the-start
• Art Not Genocide Alliance, "The Case for Boycotting the 2026 Venice Biennale," Hyperallergic, 27 February 2026. https://hyperallergic.com/the-case-for-boycotting-the-2026-venice-biennale/
• "Pussy Riot slams plans for Russian pavilion at Venice Biennale," The Art Newspaper, 6 March 2026. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2026/03/06/pussy-riot-slams-plans-russian-pavilion-venice-biennale