An unprecedented 24-hour strike will interrupt the Venice Biennale‘s opening week on Friday, May 8, in protest of Israel’s participation in the global art event. The action brings to a head tensions that have long been brewing between the Biennale’s organizers and its critics over the inclusion of countries charged with war crimes.
“What this strike reflects is a deep structural crisis for the Biennale,” said Nika Grabar of the Nonument Group, an artist and research collective that is representing Slovenia in the Arsenale. “We’re not trying to demolish the Biennale, but to save it.”
Yet the strike has also exposed divisions among participants, with some artists and pavilion teams weighing solidarity with the protest movement against the rare opportunity the Biennale offers to platform their own political and cultural messages on an international stage.
Grabar said that her team did not think twice about agreeing to take part in the strike. In particular, they believe it is important to stand in solidarity with the Biennale’s jury, which resigned shortly after it announced, on April 22, that it would not consider for the prestigious Golden Lion awards any artists representing countries accused of crimes against humanity. This would have included Israel and Russia.
An Escalation
Friday’s strike is an escalation of an ongoing campaign to see Israel excluded from the Biennale by the activist group Art Not Genocide Alliance (ANGA). In March, the group delivered the Biennale organizers a letter demanding that Israel be excluded from the exhibition. It has so far been signed by over 230 Biennale participants, including 113 artists, 38 curators, and 85 art workers.
Biennale organizers said that such initiatives, as well as any announced forms of strike action, do not involve the institution’s staff or the organization but that they are committed to ensuring the “orderly conduct of the event, in respect of freedom of expression and the plurality of opinions,” a representative said in an emailed statement, adding that “its relationships with collaborators and suppliers are governed by contracts that adhere to the law.”
Ecuador hangs posters in support of Palestine on the front of its offsite pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale. Photo: Jo Lawson-Tancred.
Some Biennale participants are on the fence about whether to join the strike action. One of the ANGA letter’s signatories was Tawna Collective, a group of artists representing Ecuador, which is celebrating its Biennale debut with an offsite pavilion near the Arsenale. The exhibition’s general producer Anna Shvets told me that the pavilion’s team is still deciding whether to strike. Though it has posters proudly expressing support for Palestine in its windows, it is weighing the issue against its own mission to spread an urgent message about colonialism in the Amazon.
“Everyone is speaking about their pain at the Biennale,” said Shvets. With pavilion costs starting in the hundreds of thousands, she said it was “crucially important” to take full advantage of any chance to reach an international audience about the ecological crises and Indigenous resistance that are central to the Ecuadorean exhibition.
Not Business as Usual
Grabar, from Slovenia’s team, describes striking as “the least we can do.”
“People are suffering, and these problems of ours here in Venice are so minor compared to what is happening [in Palestine],” she said. “If it weren’t for this protest, I don’t know how we would be able to walk around the Biennale and pretend everything is business as usual.”
Art Not Genocide Alliance protest at the Arsenale on May 6, during the opening week of the 61st Venice Biennale. Courtesy of ANGA.
“The Biennale is not only its administration,” she added. “It’s foremost artists and architects and curators. We also have a say in this and we need to preserve this as a space that is not part of a genocidal economy.”
The Slovenian pavilion is in the Arsenale, where it serves as a transitional space between other pavilions and cannot close entirely. The team plans to dim the lights and turn off their sound installation, replacing it with a livestream of the Palestinian radio station Radio Alhara.
“We want the people from Gaza to have a place in the context of the Biennale,” Grabar explained.
ANGA’s strike has been organized in collaboration with local cultural organizations, including Biennalocene, Sale Docks, Mi Riconosci, Vogliamo Tutt’altro, as well as the Italian trade unions Associazione Difesa Lavoratori (ADL Cobas), Unione Sindacale di Base (USB), and Confederazione Unitaria di Base (CUB).
Art Not Genocide Alliance protest at the Arsenale on May 6, during the opening week of the 61st Venice Biennale. Courtesy ANGA.
A demonstration is planned for 4:30 p.m. local time and will take place on one of Venice’s main streets, Via Garibaldi. An earlier protest organized by ANGA took place on Wednesday outside Israel’s temporary pavilion at the Arsenale.
Israel is being represented this year by the artist Belu-Simion Fainaru, a Romanian-born sculptor who moved to Israel in the 1970s. Fainaru did not respond to a request for comment on the strike but has previously told Artnet News that he opposes cultural boycotts. He added that his art seeks “to create spaces where encounter and shared language remain possible across political and cultural divisions.”
The Biennale’s organizers have also come under fire for allowing Russia to return to the Biennale this year after a four-year hiatus. The Russia pavilion was the site of a protest on Wednesday morning led by the punk feminist collective Pussy Riot.