A Brief Chronicle of the Venice Biennale, Continued

🇮🇱 The backstory to the jury's April resignation has come to light. On the eve of it, Belu-Simion Fainaru, artist and commissioner of the Israeli pavilion, sent the foundation a legal notice, construing the jury's declaration as antisemitism and discrimination on grounds of nationality. In other words, the jury was leaving not in a pure gesture of ethics but under the threat of legal action from the Israeli participants.

🪧 During the preview days, activists of an organisation that may not be named in Russia, together with naked female protesters, demonstrated outside the Russian pavilion; outside the Israeli one, a march of several hundred people passed under the slogan "pavilion of genocide".

✊ On 8 May, before the public opening, the first strike "for Palestine" by cultural workers in the Biennale's history took place. The Arsenale, where the Israeli pavilion is at present provisionally quartered, closed its doors, as did several national pavilions, Belgium's among them.

📜 On 9 May, the day of the public opening, a collective statement appeared renouncing participation in the contest for the Visitor Lions: 54 of the 111 artists of the main exhibition In Minor Keys, plus 16 national pavilions: Belgium, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Poland, Ireland, Switzerland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Cyprus and others. The prizes, devised a fortnight ago to replace the cancelled Golden Lions, were devalued on the very day of their birth.

💬 A Colombian artist is handing out comments to the effect that she feels drawn into complicity because her works are being shown under one roof with a "state pavilion that was not there before".

🥲 The Biennale has opened without a jury, without its principal prizes, without half of its main exhibition and with nearly two dozen national pavilions effectively out of the prize grid, with a strike on the eve and with two pavilions under permanent guard against protesters. It would seem that, instead of the renunciation of the spectacle of horror bequeathed by the late curator, it was decided to stage that spectacle with the maximum of noise.