An artist cannot represent the nation-state because … the artist herself is neither definable nor representable.
—Sanja Iveković with Rada Iveković1
Last week the international jury of the 61st Venice Biennale announced it would exclude from prize consideration “those countries whose leaders are currently charged with crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court”—presumably meaning Russia and Israel. This move resulted in the Italian culture minister sending inspectors to the Biennale’s offices; and then yesterday, the jury resigned. Within hours the Biennale replaced the Golden Lion with something called “Visitors’ Lions,” i.e., prizes voted on by ticket-holders, which meant that Russia and Israel were immediately declared eligible again. Of course, the jury’s criterion was as imperfect as the ICC itself—an institution whose jurisdiction the United States has refused to recognize since its founding, going so far as to authorize military force to prevent any American from being tried at The Hague. Trump should be indicted as much as Putin and Netanyahu, but is not. The US did not argue against accountability; it built a structure that places accountability beyond reach. The Biennale operates by the same logic.
The jury did its job too well because it dared to introduce a criterion of judgment where the institution wanted the absence of one. The result: a mass vote in which no one bears responsibility for the outcome. A living dog is better than a dead lion.2 The mass vote solves the only problem the institution recognized—that someone, somewhere in the apparatus might have to say something.
The Biennale’s official statement invokes “the principle of inclusion and equal treatment among all participants” and describes the exhibition as “a place of truce in the name of art.” A truce presupposes war, but what is this truce in the name of art actually protecting?
What is being protected is a very specific legal architecture whereby the national pavilion system operates through bilateral diplomatic concessions between states. This architecture was designed by Mussolini’s government. Royal Decree Law no. 33 of January 13, 1930 transformed a municipal exhibition into an “Ente Autonomo” under state control. The 1938 modification of the law’s articles placed the entire apparatus, including relations with foreign pavilion-holding governments, under direct fascist party control, the same year that the regime promulgated Italy’s racial laws. The decree installed Giuseppe Volpi as president: industrialist, fascist minister, governor of Italian Tripolitania, president of Confindustria. Under Volpi, whose surname, fittingly, means fox, the Biennale became a resource to be offered, art as diplomatic currency in the service of state power.3 The concession system works today exactly as it was designed to function then. Participation is a function of sovereign recognition between states, and no other considerations are admissible. This is why, when the jury attempted to make something else admissible—namely the ICC’s criminal indictment of the state leaders of Russia and Israel—the system inherited from Volpi treated it as a foreign body and expelled it.
The same system, now presided over by Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, welcomed Qatar with open arms. On June 7, 2024, the Comune di Venezia signed a Cooperation Protocol with Qatar Museums. A month later, the Comune announced it had accepted a €50 million donation from Qatar. In the same giunta session—within less than an hour—the administration approved a ninety-year concession for a new permanent Qatari pavilion on protected municipal land in the Giardini. The Municipalità of Venice, Murano, and Burano—the sub-municipal council—moved toward a negative opinion on the concession but the Comune proceeded anyway. No new permanent pavilion had been built in the Giardini for thirty years, but Qatar’s €50 million made it possible again. The administration of Luigi Brugnaro, the right-wing businessman-mayor of Venice currently facing indictment on corruption charges, formalized two nominally distinct acts in rapid succession: a financial donation and a territorial concession on heritage-protected public land.
In the Giardini, Italian municipal sovereignty, Italian state cultural authority, foreign diplomatic sovereignty, and UNESCO heritage jurisdiction stack atop one another. The Italian state, which appoints the Biennale’s president and board, treats pavilion participation as a matter of foreign relations. The Comune, which owns the land, has no role in content decisions. And each nation exercises full sovereignty over its own pavilion. The result is a jurisdictional circuit where accountability circulates endlessly. The Biennale points to sovereign recognition; the state points to institutional autonomy; the municipality points to the concession agreements; the nation points to its own sovereignty. Russia’s delegate demonstrated this logic perfectly when he announced the pavilion’s reopening: Russia had “never left the Venice Biennale,” he insisted, because the physical presence of the building (whether hosting Bolivian artists or standing empty) had always constituted Russian participation. The building is the sovereignty. The same mechanism makes it possible for Qatar to purchase a ninety-year concession on protected public land for €50 million and the same mechanism makes it impossible for Palestine to have a pavilion at all.
The question is: Why does this architecture still have the shape that a fascist government gave it? The Biennale occupies public land in a city that has lost over two-thirds of its residential population since the 1950s. The lagoon has lost 72 percent of its salt marshes. The Canale dei Petroli, dug between 1964 and 1968 to allow oil tankers to reach Marghera, cut a channel eighteen meters deep and two hundred meters wide through a lagoon whose average depth was less than a meter. MOSE, the flood barrier system built to protect Venice from the acqua alta, built by a private concession holder under state contract, has the same hybrid legal form as the Biennale. Each intervention into the lagoon was authorized by a different body, under a different legal framework, at a different time. The legal governance of the fragile lagoon ecosystem is identical to the Biennale’s: overlapping jurisdictions, distributed responsibility, with no single entity accountable for systemic effects. The lagoon has been granted more legal protections than almost any ecosystem in Europe—UNESCO, Ramsar, Natura 2000, the Habitats Directive, the Birds Directive, the Special Law for Venice, constitutional amendments. The lagoon is protected by every legal instrument available and no one is legally required to keep it alive.
Volpi built the Biennale and Volpi built Marghera, the petrochemical complex on the lagoon’s edge that was fascism’s futurist promise to drag Venice into industrial modernity. It has been poisoning the lagoon ever since. The same extractive logic and the same legal technology—the concession, the overlapping jurisdiction, the murky public-private hybrid—governs both the cultural institution and the ecosystem it parasitically sits inside. This means that the Biennale and the lagoon are connected by a history of legal architecture, and by the name of the man who designed both systems to do exactly what they are still doing.
This is the structure the jury collided with when it attempted something very simple: to name an obligation. A cultural institution should not award prizes to states whose leaders are under indictment for crimes against humanity. The obligation is specific, it has a legal basis, and it identifies a responsible party.
Ultimately, the question is not which states the Biennale should exclude. The question is whether an institution that cannot bear the weight of a single obligation, that responds to the naming of responsibility by dissolving the capacity for judgment, can claim legitimacy at all. The Biennale needs a restructuring so total that what would emerge would bear little resemblance to what currently exists. Beyond the imperial absurdity of national representation in art, it would need a legal form capable of fulfilling actual obligations to the city whose land it occupies, to the lagoon it is helping to destroy, and to the brutal political present.
Instead, the institution performs its own innocence with remarkable consistency. It cannot exclude, it cannot judge; it can only include, dialogue, remain open. Every verb is intransitive and nothing has an object and nobody does anything to anyone. We know very well that we are platforming states under indictment for crimes against humanity, but nevertheless—truce, art, dialogue, openness. The Golden Lion chokes on the “nevertheless.”
Meanwhile, the lagoon chokes on something more material, as the fight continues over plans to dredge 1.28 million cubic meters of toxic sediment from the Vittorio Emanuele III canal to bring cruise ships back into the lagoon, routing them through the Canale dei Petroli, the same wound Marghera cut through the lagoon’s body sixty years ago. The sediment on the canal floor is saturated with heavy metals and industrial toxins from decades of petrochemical production. The poison concentrations there are 120 times higher than in the rest of the lagoon, and dredging it would disperse those toxins into the water. But no single body would be responsible for the consequences.
The gigantic cruise ships and gigantic exhibitions are not separate problems. The grandi navi and the grandi mostre are manifestations of the same mastodon tonnage passing through the same fragile membrane between land and sea, absorbing ever more tourist beds, temporary walls, exhibition carpets, and black boxes. The Venetians who fought to ban cruise ships from the Giudecca Canal, who occupy abandoned housing, who fight to keep schools and hospitals open, know this.
It requires institutional effort to know nothing so consistently, for so long, about so much.
From Pourquoi un(e) artiste ne peut représenter un État nation, performed at the Musée d’Art Contemporain, Val-de-Marne, France, October 21, 2012.
The American Pavilion’s own story belongs here, with the dogs. Its expert advisory panel was bypassed, the original selection collapsed, and into the vacuum stepped the American Arts Conservancy, a Tampa, Florida nonprofit founded last July whose commissioner’s previous venture was Feed Pet Purveyor, a natural pet food business.
For an in-depth account of the Biennale's institutional architecture, see the work of Vittoria Martini, whose three essays for NERO Editions—"The Responsibility of a Cultural Institution" (2024) and the two-part "Dreamers of the Day" (2025)—draw on twenty years of research in the Biennale's own archives.
