178 Venice Biennale Participants Sign Open Letter Urging Israel’s Exclusion
A new open letter calling on the Venice Biennale to bar Israel from this year’s exhibition has sharpened an already volatile debate over national representation, artistic platforms, and the limits of institutional neutrality.
Published March 17, 2026, by the activist group Art Not Genocide Alliance (ANGA), the letter has been signed by 178 Biennale participants. Among the signatories are artists Alfredo Jaar, Tai Shani, Yto Barrada, Sophia Al-Maria, and Meriem Bennani. Also signing is curator Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, one of several curators chosen by the late Koyo Kouoh to help carry forward her vision for the Biennale’s main exhibition, titled “In Minor Keys.”
In the letter, ANGA frames the deaths of artists, musicians, poets, and journalists in Gaza as “an attempted annihilation of not just the Palestinian people but Palestinian culture.” It argues that “no artist or cultural worker should be asked to share a platform with this genocidal state,” urging the Biennale to exclude Israel from the 2026 edition.
The petition draws support from representatives connected to roughly 25 national pavilions, according to the letter. A small number of signatories opted to remain anonymous, citing “fear of possible physical, political, or legal harms.” Others who signed are participating in official collateral events or in Kouoh’s central exhibition.
The Venice Biennale did not respond to a request for comment on the letter.
The institution’s position, however, has been stated publicly in recent weeks. When organizers released the full list of participating nations earlier this month, they issued an accompanying statement emphasizing the Biennale as a place of “artistic freedom” and asserting that it “rejects any form of exclusion or censorship in culture and art.” That stance has been tested amid renewed controversy over Russia’s planned return to the Biennale after sitting out the last two editions in the wake of its war on Ukraine.
Israel’s participation has been a flashpoint for ANGA since before the 2024 Biennale, when the group circulated a petition that it said was signed by more than 24,000 artists, curators, writers, and cultural workers. While the Biennale did not remove Israel from the roster, Israel’s artist Ruth Patir and the pavilion’s curators ultimately kept the pavilion closed until there was a ceasefire. The pavilion never opened.
Israel did not take part in the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2025 because its Giardini pavilion was undergoing renovation. For 2026, with construction still underway, the Biennale is accommodating Israel’s presentation in the Arsenale.
Israel is being represented this year by Romanian-born, Haifa-based artist Belu-Simion Fainaru. He is planning a new iteration of “Rose of Nothingness,” a project previously installed in the Romania Pavilion at the 58th Biennale in 2019.
Fainaru did not respond to a request for comment on ANGA’s latest letter. In January, he told ARTnews that “art is a place for dialogue, not for exclusion,” adding that it can be a space to move beyond politics and “express the voice of people freely, without any borders.”
As the Biennale approaches, the letter signals that the question of who is granted a national platform in Venice — and under what ethical conditions — will remain central to the exhibition’s public life, from the Giardini to the Arsenale and beyond.
