Venice Biennale’s Forgotten “Freedom in Chile” Show Is Back in Focus as Politics Presses In
The Venice Biennale has long presented itself as a barometer of contemporary culture, but one of its most direct political gestures is now being revisited as a near-impossible precedent. In 1974, the institution staged “Libertà al Cile” (“Freedom in Chile”), an explicitly antifascist initiative organized by Ripa di Meana in solidarity with Chile under Augusto Pinochet, who had seized power in a military coup the year before.
The project was pointed in both title and method. Rather than centering new canvases or monumental sculpture, “Libertà al Cile” brought posters denouncing fascism into public settings, turning the city into a platform for international condemnation. Ripa di Meana described the effort as “an act of dutiful solidarity and democratic faith,” a formulation that left little doubt about the Biennale’s intended role: not merely to exhibit art, but to stage a civic demonstration.
That kind of institutional clarity feels distant amid the Biennale’s more recent controversies, where political pressure has arrived through a patchwork of protests, closures, and competing demands for accountability.
In 2022, the Russian Pavilion became a focal point after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The Biennale later emphasized that it did not order the pavilion closed; the decision came from the artists and curator representing Russia, who called the war “unbearable.” Yet the same edition also introduced the Piazza Ucraina, a move that signaled the Biennale was not neutral on the conflict, even if the most visible act of refusal came from within the Russian presentation itself.
Other national representations have generated their own debates. Israel’s presence has been protested in the wake of the October 7 Hamas attack and Israel’s subsequent military bombardment of Gaza. On opening day, artist Ruth Patir shuttered Israel’s Venice Biennale pavilion to the public, a gesture that underscored how quickly the pavilion model can become a stage for political confrontation.
Iran’s pavilion has also faced scrutiny, with calls for its ejection tied to a mass protest movement against the country’s oppressive regime. And the absence of a Palestinian pavilion remains a structural fault line: Palestine has never had an official Biennale pavilion because it is not recognized as a nation in Italy.
Taken together, these episodes point to a recurring tension: the Biennale’s global prestige depends on the fiction that art can be framed apart from geopolitics, even as the pavilion system is built on national representation and international power.
Art historian Vittoria Martini, writing in a 2024 essay, argued that the Biennale cannot be disentangled from the world around it — a position that resonates as the institution navigates conflicts that do not stay outside the Giardini and Arsenale gates.
The question is sharpened by the Biennale’s own rhetoric about what lies ahead. President Pietrangelo Buttafuoco has said the 2026 edition, curated by Koyo Kouoh, will center “the joy of authentic art, that which so faithfully resembles real life.” If the Biennale is committed to art that mirrors lived reality, it may also have to confront what “real life” now means in an era of war, protest, and contested national visibility — and whether the institution can still claim the kind of moral legibility it once embraced with “Libertà al Cile.”
