<nettime> The 2026 Venice Biennale Implodes: Diplomatic Collapse, Historic Strike, and the Privatisation of Art

[Technologies To The People via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

The 61st Venice Art Biennale has just opened its doors, and it is already
operating as an institution in a state of emergency. Before the public had
even begun to stroll through the Giardini and the Arsenale as usual the
2026 edition was already rife with resignations, boycotts, shuttered
pavilions, artists sacked and reinstated, absent countries, European
funding under threat, mass protests, and the first strike in its 131-year
history. What had long presented itself as the great Olympics of art has
become the stage of its own decomposition.

The 2026 Venice Biennale demonstrates that the model of national
representation born in the nineteenth century has come to an end. It isn't
broken: it is functioning exactly as it was designed, but in a world that
no longer tolerates the fiction. What is collapsing is not a difficult
edition of the biennial. It is the model itself: the old diplomatic
architecture of national pavilions, the fiction of institutional
neutrality, the idea that art can operate as a zone of truce while the very
states that finance, name and represent it wage wars, carry out ethnic
cleansing, censor at home and run cultural propaganda campiagns The
Biennale does not reflect a world in crisis. It administers it and puts it
on display as a symptom.

The central exhibition, *In Minor Keys*, arrives marked by an absence that
runs through the entire reading of the show. Its artistic director, Koyo
Kouoh, died in May 2025. Her team has brought to completion a posthumous
vision oriented towards listening, healing, physical and spiritual rest,
low frequencies, oases of care. A Biennale that avoids overtly political
art and seeks other forms of symbolic repair. On the threshold of the
Arsenale, the curatorial team inscribes *If I Must Die*, the poem by Refaat
Alareer, the Palestinian writer killed in Gaza in 2023. The gesture set an
ethical frame before the exhibition had even begun. But the institutional
apparatus that surrounds that threshold swallows it.

The Biennale calls for silence while everything around it is screaming. It
speaks of pause while Gaza, Ukraine, Lebanon, Iran, Sudan and the far-right
international run through every conversation in the corridors. It proposes
minor keys at a moment of deafening historical noise. The question is not
whether rest is necessary. It is. The question is who gets to rest, under
what conditions, inside which institution, and at whose expense. In a
Biennale sustained by states, elite tourism, luxury brands and precarious
cultural labor, the language of care risks becoming an anesthetic, no
matter how long Alareer's verse remains on the wall.

The controversy broke open when the international jury resigned en masse
just days before the opening. Its position is unambiguous: it will not
evaluate or award prizes to representatives of states whose leaders have
been charged or are being prosecuted by the International Criminal Court
for war crimes or crimes against humanity. The reference points directly at
Russia and Israel. The institution, unable to hold that conflict, responded
by cancelling the traditional prize system and improvising a public-vote
award, the so-called Visitor Lion. It then postponed the Golden Lion
ceremony to 22 November, the closing day of the Biennale. In other words,
it relocated critical judgement to the end of the event, when it would no
longer have any political effect. The manoeuvre resolved nothing. It turned
an ethical crisis into a mechanism of tourist participation.

The artists' response was immediate. Dozens withdrew their works from the
competition. The prize was left symbolically empty. When an institution no
longer knows how to decide, it delegates to an interface. When critical
judgement becomes dangerous, it is replaced by a poll. The problem does not
go away. It becomes more visible.

>From that point on, the Biennale stopped being a map of countries and
became a map of conflicts. Russia is not only Russia: it is the war in
Ukraine and the normalisation of imperial aggression. And its return to
Venice, far from being an administrative formality, was negotiated in
secret from June 2025 by commissioner Anastasia Karneeva, daughter of a
senior Rostec executive and FSB general. Internal correspondence leaked by *La
Repubblica* revealed strategies for getting around European sanctions
through pre-recorded performances, along with active logistical support
from the Biennale's own management in securing Italian visas for the
Russian pavilion's curator. The European Commission has threatened to
withdraw two million euros in funding and described the Russian
participation as a "propaganda mechanism" incompatible with the sanctions
regime. The Biennale claims it is the UN of art, open to any state
recognized by Italy. The documents suggest something else: a parallel,
anticipatory, discreet diplomacy. Israel is not only Israel: it is Gaza,
the accusation of genocide, the Western diplomatic shield, and the dispute
over the limits of cultural boycott; it becomes the epicenter of the
mobilizations against *artwashing*. Iran is not only an absence: it
withdraws quietly, leaving a gap that signals the impossibility of
separating culture from the military escalation in the Middle East. Lebanon
is not only a place of origin: it is a zone of suspicion projected onto
artists' bodies and biographies, as shown by the case of Khaled Sabsabi,
selected to represent Australia, dismissed and later reinstated after a
controversy over earlier works featuring images of Hezbollah. The work
stops being read as work and starts operating as a file.

The United States did not escape the discomfort either, but its case has
its own texture. The National Endowment for the Arts has seen its funding
cut under the new Trump administration. The University of South Florida,
originally tasked with coordinating the country's representation, collapsed
bureaucratically. The handover went to an opaque body, the American Arts
Conservancy, headed by a businesswoman from the pet food sector. The
selected artist, Alma Allen, is exhibiting under conditions that have less
to do with a national pavilion than with a privatized emergency commission.
Beyond the individual case, the detail sketches an architecture: a
far-right cultural offensive that no longer limits itself to attacking
museums from the outside but hollows institutions out from within and
repopulates them with figures from the corporate field. Culture is another
front in the identity war. Trumpism understands the value of these spaces
very well. It does not want to abandon them. It wants to occupy them. It
wants to discipline institutions, turn artistic freedom into propaganda for
national values, and reinstate an authoritarian idea of cultural prestige.
What we are watching in Venice is the international rehearsal of that
operation.

The protest did not emerge spontaneously or in disarray. It had logistics,
political memory, infrastructure. The organizing work of ANGA, Sale Docks,
Morion, Biennalocene and Taring Padi proved decisive in turning unease into
coordinated action. ANGA denounced *artwashing* and demanded the exclusion
of the Israeli pavilion. Sale Docks and Morion brought an accumulated
Venetian experience of self-management, cultural trade unionism, political
occupation and territorial organizing. Biennalocene introduced the
ecological concerns and the critique of the event's own extractive model.
Taring Padi added a genealogy of militant graphic work, collective art and
international solidarity. Thanks to this network, the protest was not
reduced to gesture. It became a viable structure.

The 8 May strike marked a turning point. It was not a protest against a
single pavilion. It was a challenge to the Biennale's entire
infrastructure. Pavilions were shut down, openings were delayed,
performances were suspended, installations were intervened in. Palestinian
flags appeared, posters, pickets, bodies blocked the normal stroll through
the event. A substantial share of the national pavilions was affected. For
the first time in 131 years, the Biennale faced a strike on this scale.

And then something decisive happened. The strike shifted the gaze. It was
no longer only about the artist as authorial figure or the curator as
intellectual mediator. The workers who hold the machinery up came into
view: mediators, installers, security staff, technicians, assistants,
gallery attendants, translators, producers, cleaners, transporters. The
great global exhibition revealed itself for what it always was and is
almost never named: a fragile, precarious, outsourced labor infrastructure.
The glamour of the opening week rests on a material base that normally
remains invisible. The strike made it visible.

While the state model sinks into its own contradictions, another power
moves forward with considerably greater stability. Private capital does not
wait. And it deserves to be named precisely, because confusion serves the
apparatus itself. When national pavilions close due to pickets or boycotts,
the corporate foundations do not suffer. They program. While the state
loses legitimacy, they gain ground, budget and agenda. The public crisis is
their private opportunity.

The Fondation Pinault now operates as a power parallel to the Biennale: two
permanent venues in Venice, Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana,
year-round programming, a budget that doubles that of many pavilions, and a
curatorial line that sets international agenda without going through any
public decision. Bulgari has negotiated its appointment as Exclusive
Partner of the International Art Exhibition into the next decade, locking
in the rights for the 2026, 2028 and 2030 editions. This is not
sponsorship: it is institutional integration. Corporate capital becomes
inscribed in the Biennale's machinery, funding restorations, prizes and
events that embed themselves in the official calendar until they become
indistinguishable from the program itself. Prada produces, through its
Fondazione, a sophisticated curatorial discourse that quickly metabolizes
the critical languages of the moment, from ecology to decolonization.
Patrizia Sandretto has gone one step further: in 2026 she inaugurated her
third permanent site by buying and rehabilitating an entire island in the
northern lagoon. This is no longer about renting palaces. It is about
privatizing ecosystem. And all of it under the language of the climate
emergency, which private capital uses to rewrite the cultural geography of
the city. TBA21 does something equivalent on the symbolic plane: through
Ocean Space, in the church of San Lorenzo, it is presenting a project this
year on the repatriation and restitution of objects looted from Indigenous
communities. It thereby captures, in philanthropic key, one of the debates
currently fracturing Europe's state museums, and hands it back framed as a
benevolent initiative of corporate capital. They are not patrons. They are
the new cultural sovereigns, with their own diplomacy, institutional access
and palaces. And the state, far from containing them, opens the doors wide:
the recent concession of a pavilion to Qatar for ninety years in exchange
for forty million euros confirms that sovereignty in the lagoon is now
traded on a market.

The success of this operation lies not in its economic volume, which also
counts, but in its tone. Privatization does not arrive in reactionary
aesthetics. It arrives with progressive vocabulary, impeccable lighting and
sophisticated mediation. That is where its power lies. Where the state
appears clumsy, violent, censorious or paralysed, private capital presents
itself as flexible, cosmopolitan and sensitive. It does not need to raise a
flag. Producing atmosphere is enough. It does not censor: it metabolizes.
It turns conflict into programming, criticism into reputation, historical
injury into symbolic capital. And it does so, moreover, with the signatures
of some of the most prestigious curators in the field, which shields the
operation from any suspicion of opportunism.

The Biennale is thus split between two forces that no longer admit
synthesis. On one side, an artistic, labor and militant base demanding
material accountability from institutions, refusing to share a platform
with states accused of atrocities, and understanding culture as a real
field of conflict. On the other, a corporate machinery that absorbs crises
and returns them as high-end aesthetic experience. Between the two, the old
cultural diplomacy is crumbling without anyone really defending it.

Venice 2026 is not failing because politics has invaded art. It fails
because institutional art spent far too long pretending it could administer
politics without getting its hands dirty. The national pavilion, the
international prize, the luxury patronage, the VIP week, cultural tourism
and the rhetoric of neutrality are all part of the same apparatus. This
edition did not destroy it. It made it visible.

That is why the 61st Biennale will be remembered less for its works than
for its interruptions. The jury that walked out. The secret diplomacy with
Moscow. The Golden Lion postponed to the last day. Iran disappearing from
the map. Israel turned into the epicenter of the boycott. Lebanon read
under suspicion. The United States hollowed out and reoccupied by the
Trumpist offensive. Qatar buying sovereignty for ninety years. The artists
who withdrew their names. The workers who stopped work. The collectives
that organized. The flags that broke into the white cube.

The Biennale is not over. It has barely begun. But something essential has
already been laid bare. The institution can no longer claim legitimacy on
the basis of a political and legal design from the past. Neutrality has run
its course as an alibi. What we will see in the coming weeks is not a
debate about contemporary art. It is the dispute over who defines what
global culture is: the organized pressure of those who interrupt the
machinery, or the capacity of capital to absorb everything without breaking
a sweat.

Meanwhile, Alareer's poem remains on the threshold of the Arsenale, a
reminder that minor keys are no longer enough.

In Venice, that conflict is no longer outside the exhibition. It is the
exhibition.
-- 
# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: https://www.nettime.org
# contact: nettime-l-owner@lists.nettime.org