Venice Biennale Pavilions Close in Strike Over Israel’s Participation
A wave of closures swept through the Venice Biennale on May 8 as artists, curators, and art workers staged a coordinated strike against Israel’s participation in the exhibition and the labor conditions that sustain it. Around 18 pavilions were reported to have joined in full or partial shutdowns, with 237 participants said to be involved.
The action was organized by Art Not Genocide Alliance (ANGA), which said it was rejecting “the normalisation of Israel’s presence in cultural spaces” and the “economies of genocide in culture,” while also denouncing the precarious labor ecosystem built around the Biennale. Austria, Lebanon, Slovenia, Egypt, and Poland were among the countries that took part.
The protest took different forms across the grounds. In the Netherlands, artist Dries Verhoeven stood outside his pavilion with a Palestinian flag and protest materials hanging behind him on the shuttered door. He said Israel had been given the chance to “art-wash” itself through a pavilion in the Arsenale, one of the Biennale’s two main venues. Verhoeven also pointed to South Africa’s exclusion from the Biennale from the late 1960s until 1993 during apartheid, calling that precedent instructive.
Poland’s pavilion closed from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. Agniescka Pindera, the pavilion’s commissioner, said the curators and artists behind the project were deeply affected by the inclusion of Israel and Russia and wanted to “provide a release” for those emotions. She added that the strike was meant to signal that “business is not as usual” and to press the Biennale toward changing its participation rules.
Elsewhere, the responses were partial rather than total. Hadar Ophir’s installation Living: Gathering in Venice was temporarily shut down, Japan kept its pavilion open but suspended the participatory and audio elements of the work, and several other pavilions were closed without their artists or curators present. In the Lebanese pavilion, one campaign poster declared: “We stand with Palestine because we know by now that the destruction of Palestine is the destruction of the world.”
The strike lands amid broader controversy over the Biennale’s handling of Russia and Israel. Russia’s pavilion was set to close once the exhibition opened to the public on May 9, after warnings from the European Union that the Biennale could be breaching sanctions by facilitating Russia’s participation. Last month, the prize jury resigned after saying it would not consider artists from countries whose leaders are under arrest warrants for crimes against humanity, a statement widely understood as referring to Russia and Israel. ANGA has said it does not want to end the Biennale, but to force it to reckon with the political and ethical terms on which it operates.
