In 2022, the year Russia rolled into Ukraine, I attended the Venice Biennale. I was filled with all things Venice: the golden interior of St. Mark’s, the lapping of the canals, the picaresque bridges, the bells, the periodic flooding. I was also filled with Anselm Kiefer, whose work had been installed in the Palazzo Ducale: the walls of the Doge’s Palace had been given a second skin; giant Kiefer canvases stood floor to ceiling, concealing all of the old masterworks of the Sala della Scrutinio from view, and placing in their stead, contemporary visions of timeless decay, rupture, illumination and war. The city had invited Kiefer to reflect on its history, and Kiefer being Kiefer, had found the darkness; visions that both encompassed and eclipsed its often bloody, fire-licked periods of conquest, shot through with moments of spiritual light and decay. The Palazzo Ducale had never known anything so stark, so wounded. It was electrifying.
Against this backdrop I made my way with a friend to the Biennale itself. Everything, it must be said, after Kiefer’s display, was underwhelming. Kiefer towers, not just in scale, but in scope; his subject, the very rise and fall of nations, the melancholic debris of war’s aftermath. Pavilion after pavilion failed to escape the German artist’s shadow. That is, until we found ourselves in front of the Russian Pavilion. It was closed.
The Biennale Foundation, like the majority of cultural institutions in the West, had taken a stand, and banned the Russian Federation from participation in its iconic, international event. It strikes me now, years later, that Russia’s absence from the Biennale that year was a powerful corollary to Kiefer’s presence in the Palazzo Ducale. The two formed a binary: one, an aggressor waging an imperialist war, the other, an artist reflecting on 2000 years of history, encompassing fire, devastation and conflict.
The Biennale was right to exclude Russia; to do otherwise would show it could act without cultural reprisal. It was a powerful statement, and the country’s absence held within it more ‘art’ than its presence, at that point, could ever have done; for the political moment would render any Russian artist, put forward by the state, either mute or complicit or both.
Which is why it is astounding that the Biennale Foundation, has this year, lifted its ban on the Russian Federation, and invited its participation. It is an inexplicable decision, and has been met with condemnation and outrage both within Italy, Ukraine and across the EU. Indeed, the Biennale faces losing €2 million in EU funding over its new position.
The Biennale Foundation president, according to the Guardian, said, that he had invited people “from all areas of conflict to share their points of view. We believe that where there is art, there is dialogue.”
The idea that state-sponsored artists from Russia could express an independent point of view on the conflict in Ukraine is, of course, laughable. The 2025 documentary, ‘Mr Nobody Versus Putin,’ made by Pavel Talankin, a brave Russian school teacher (now in exile), drives this point home. In this film, Talankin, the school’s videographer, documents his school in Karabash (located in the Ural mountains), as it undergoes the transition from a pre-2022 curriculum to a war-time one, in which questions and answers, on all topics, are now read by rote from state-supplied texts.
We see a lively school become a depressed one, we watch joyful interactions between students and teachers become fearful ones. Students, who had previously hung out with Talankin in his ‘open office’ were now afraid to be seen with him, as his opposition to Putin had become known. The documentary is both moving and chilling. The Biennale Foundation would do well to project it onto the Russian Pavilion, to play it continuously at night on a loop. That would be art by a brave Russian artist, footage smuggled out of an authoritarian country; not propaganda from a state, that is all too ready to whitewash its crimes, to legitimise its imperialist war.
