It Turns Out the Biennale Also Has a Kazakh Pavilion, and a Scandal to Go With It

"The Machine", an installation by the artist Assel Kadyrkhanova devoted to Stalinist repression and the Red Terror, was secretly dismantled by the administration of the pavilion itself before the opening, and the spot where it had been displayed was hung with a black curtain.

Officials are reported to have demanded that the author change the concept of the work, citing the agreement with the Italian Naval Museum, where the pavilion is housed, under which the exhibition must not be political or ideological in character. They added that the work was not new in any case: the installation itself was created in 2013.

The museum's administration, however, has denied that any such conditions or demands came from its side.

The artist described the authorities' actions as a direct act of censorship and pressure on creative freedom.

Though, in my view, a black curtain in place of the former typewriter, with its bloody threads running to the case files of the repressed, is not a bad statement in its own right.