Pussy Riot crash Russia's party at the Venice Art Biennale

VeniceThe 61st Venice Art Biennale continues with fury. This Wednesday the protests against the presence of Russia and Israel have been more forceful. As they had warned, more than 50 people linked to the activists Pussy Riot, with their faces covered by pink balaclavas, have occupied the Russian pavilion, along with a string of members of the Femen collective. The Italian police were forced to close the pavilion while agents and security guards subdued the activists who had managed to enter. Outside, the tension continued: the protesters sang the song Desobeeix amid a cloud of pink smoke and the Femen members advanced shouting slogans amid a cloud of blue and yellow, the colors of the Ukrainian flag.

In a statement, one of Pussy Riot's founders, Nadya Tolokonnikova, railed against the European Union: "Russia's best citizens are either imprisoned for actions against the regime and in favor of Ukraine, or they die in prison, while Europe opens its doors to Putin's officials and propagandists. If art is to represent a country at the Venice Biennale, a kind of Olympics of the art world, then artists imprisoned for their anti-war and pro-Ukraine stance are the true face of contemporary Russia." She also addressed the President of the Biennale. "While Pietrangelo Buttafuoco welcomes his Russian guests with champagne, drones and ballistic missiles are falling in Ukraine, and thousands of prisoners of war and political prisoners sit in cold cells. Their lives are not an abstraction; their lives deserve to be taken into account," the statement also says.

To reverse this situation, Pussy Riot makes a proposal: "If art is to truly overcome censorship, we propose a plan for imprisoned artists, current and former, to represent Russia at the 2028 Venice Biennale. All we need is for Russia's pavilion to be taken out of the hands of illegal terrorists who are currently waging the largest war in Europe since World War II and handed over to those who have spent years in the gulags of this oppressive regime and who explicitly support Ukraine's sovereignty." In the same statement, Inna Xevtxenko of Femen is equally blunt: "Every Russian work exhibited this year stands on an invisible pedestal: Ukrainian blood. You won't find it in the catalog. But it is the only material that truly sustains this pavilion."

The Russian response came very quickly: they mocked the protest by publishing a video on Instagram showing a group of people dancing inside the pavilion, including two men in pink balaclavas, while the demonstration continued outside.

On the other hand, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco spoke on the matter at a press conference: "This world born from the French Revolution, the Enlightenment, and secularism has turned into its absolute opposite: a laboratory of intolerance and demands for censorship, closure, and exclusion," Buttafuoco stated. "The Biennale is not a court; it is a garden of peace. We cannot close it, we cannot resort to boycott as an automatic response. We have to debate. We can disagree, and we do so firmly," the president warned.

Regarding the Ukrainian representation, the most visible is the sculpture Origami Deer, by Zhanna Kadyrova, which can be seen hanging from a crane at the entrance to the Biennale. This deer has become a symbol of fragility and resilience, because in 2018 it was installed in a park on an old pedestal where there used to be a Soviet military plane capable of carrying nuclear weapons. With the start of the Russian invasion, to protect it, the work was moved from Pokrovsk across the entire country, and is now in Venice as part of a European tour. In this context, this Friday afternoon, the Biennale of Words - Dissent and Peace conference is scheduled to be held, with the directors of the different areas of the Venice Biennale.

Actions against Israel

Hours later, another demonstration of about two hundred people took place in front of the Israeli pavilion, organized by the collective Art Not Genocide Alliance (ANGA). The protesters carried a banner with the slogan "No to'artwashing of genocide", they read a manifesto and distributed leaflets with information related to the Palestinian humanitarian crisis caused by the war, which stated: "Can you tolerate it? No to the genocide pavilion". "What is the image of our time? It is not a work of art. It is Gaza reduced to kilometer after kilometer of rubble. It is a body torn apart by bombs, dying without anesthesia in a hospital bed stained with blood. The Biennale turns its back on the reality of these images and moves towards an empty fantasy of inclusion and tolerance. We are here to express our refusal to tolerate genocidal destruction in the name of freedom," the manifesto read. It also recalled the call for a strike this Friday afternoon.

Those in charge of the Israeli pavilion were forced to close for a few hours at midday. "There was a demonstration and the protesters are still in the premises; we closed to feel safe," said one of those responsible.