Since the start of the large-scale genocide in Gaza, which sparked global resistance, the Israeli pavilion of the Venice Biennale has mobilized to wash the country’s brand with art.
Two months before the opening of the 2024 Venice Biennale, a petition written by the Art Not Genocide Alliance (ANGA) and signed by thousands of artists and curators called for the exclusion of the ‘Genocide Pavilion’, claiming that it represented a state ‘involved in ongoing atrocities against Palestinians’. Large demonstrations accompanied the call, which echoed Palestinian solidarity campaigns launched by artists at the 2015 Venice Biennale.
Instead of seriously responding to these demands, Ruth Patir, the artist representing Israel, sidestepped them: together with curators Mira Lapidot and Tamar Margalit, on the eve of the opening, she posted a sign on the door of the pavilion that read: “The artist and curators of the Israeli pavilion will open the exhibition when an agreement on a ceasefire and the release of hostages is reached.”
Patir did not respond to a request for comment from Hyperallergic about whether she would have opened the pavilion now that these conditions have apparently been met. This self-imposed boycott allowed Patir to promote morality and principles without recognizing legitimate anti-Zionist Jewish and Palestinian voices or incurring any political risk.
This is the danger of the liberal Zionist position. It offers the language of conscience and dialogue, while absolving itself of involvement or responsibility. Patir was able to present herself as ethically contradictory, while still accepting the Biennale’s significant artist fees and production money, funded by Israel’s budget of 1.65 million shekels (~$530,928), while rejecting calls for cooperation with Palestinian solidarity organizations.
She never had to take sides, was never forced to suffer the consequences, and never came out worse, but was rewarded. The Jewish Museum in New York City acquired her work (Motherlandcreated for that year’s Biennale Pavilion, in December 2024 for an undisclosed sum.
For this year’s pavilion, ANGA reiterated its call for exclusion from the Israeli pavilion. Yet both the framework and the outcome are determined in advance. To avoid a repeat of the 2024 controversy, the Israeli government introduced a contractual clause obliging the artist to ensure that the pavilion remains open despite protests. Art no longer functions even symbolically as a cover here; it functions as a procedural mechanism, carried out by an artist selected for compliance rather than merit. Israel’s participation in this year’s Venice Biennale has thus been reduced to a single objective: to insist on visibility at all costs, and to assert a presence in the face of a boycott.
This happened in active collaboration with the management of the Venice Biennale. While the Israeli pavilion is being renovated, the Biennale’s management has offered to house it in the Arsenale – rather than asking Israel to rent a space on the private market, as the other national representations without permanent pavilions do. According to ANGA, instead of responding to artists’ calls to exclude Israel, the Biennale’s management insists its hands are tied as they go to great lengths to accommodate the pavilion.
Perhaps unwittingly, management allocated Israel the most appropriate space for a pavilion that functions less as an artistic proposal than as a geopolitical gesture: Armory G, dating from around 1460, was used to store weapons and organize Venice’s military might for visiting elites.
The Romanian-Israeli artist Belu-Simion Fainaru apparently fit the bill and was significant Portfolio magazine that he is “extremely pleased to represent Israel in such complex times.” In recent interviews, Fainero has essentially rewritten a mandatory contractual clause to include his artistic mission, stating that he would Calcalist: “Even if they protest against us, the Israeli pavilion at the Biennale should not be closed.”
Fainaru, who immigrated to Israel from Bucharest in 1973, embodies the carefully blended contradictions that make him an ideal instrument of cultural soft power. As the Israel Prize Committee put it, his work “combines Jewish symbolism and mysticism, alongside the memory of the Holocaust and a universal approach to life and death, wandering and flight, power relations and endless spiraling struggle.” Fainaru frames art as a social mission and the art world as a platform for diplomacy, appealing to Jewish-Arab coexistence while paradoxically emphasizing that he “does not operate within political frameworks” and that the essence of art is “to overcome the political, institutional and diplomatic levels.” This ideological minestrone – part universalism, part national myth, part trauma discourse – allows his work to circulate smoothly in institutional and diplomatic contexts.
Most shocking is his emphasis on art as redemptive, offering “a desire to live” and a process of “recovery and healing” after “Israeli trauma” – language that becomes perverse when set against the ongoing, systematic genocide in Gaza and the escalating displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank.
At the Biennale, Fainaru presents “The Rose of Nothingness” (2015), first realized in 2015 at Galeria Plan B in Berlin and exhibited at Art Basel in 2019, developed with musician Iddo Bar-Shai and Sorin Heller from the Hecht Museum in Haifa. “The rose of nothingness” consists of a pool that collects water droplets from a dripper array hanging above. Framed by metaphors of tears, Kabbalah and ‘nothing’, the work explicitly celebrates Israeli drip irrigation technology. The irrigation system, introduced in 1965, has become an emblem of Zionist ingenuity and lends credence to the myth that Israel “made the desert bloom.”
The “nothing” is an omission in disguise: Israel controls roughly 80% of the West Bank’s water resources and regulates access through permits, infrastructure and movement restrictions that severely limit Palestinian agriculture while allowing settlement expansion. Like the Associated press According to reports, illegal Israeli settlers use up to 700 liters of water per day, while some Palestinian communities survive on just 26 liters of water per day – exposing irrigation not as a neutral technology, but as a weaponized control system. ‘The Rose of Nothingness’ thus perpetuates a national myth, while ignoring the reality that water is used as a weapon of coercion.
The artwork refers to the 1948 poem ‘Death Fugue’ by the Jewish-Romanian poet Paul Celan. A captivating poem that pushes the boundaries of form and borrows heavily from the compositional structure of the musical fugue. It describes the horrors of the Holocaust, to which Celan lost both his parents, through dark, evocative images that paint a fragmented and distorted picture of reality. Fainaru effectively co-opts the historical suffering of European Jews and purifies the images into the calm black pool. The musical fugue is defined by recurring motifs and counterpoints, which inspire one line that recurs in this poem: ‘Death is a master from Germany.’ But the one recurring motif in “The Rose of Nothingness” is its refusal to engage with contemporary reality, returning instead to the Israeli nationalist story of a people overcoming a horrific fate and turning into ingenious inventors. The counterpoint that ‘Fugue of Death’ beautifully executed looms outside ‘The Rose of Nothingness’, stubbornly ignored by Fainaru: it is the exception of Palestine.
It comes as no surprise that Israel would once again attempt to artificially wash its image by re-invoking the Holocaust, which has been used time and time again to justify Israel’s genocide in Gaza and weaponize historical guilt to distract from the fact that death is now a master of Israel.
Posters from the 1974 Venice Biennale as a Chilean solidarity forum, managed by Disobedience Archive (images courtesy of Marco Scotini)
As ANGA argues, the Venice Biennale has never been the neutral space it now claims to be. In 1974, in response to Pinochet’s dictatorship, artists and curators demanded solidarity with Chilean dissidents. The Biennale responded by abandoning the traditional exhibition format and reconstructing itself as a political forum. This remains one of the few moments when a major global art event voluntarily suspends its aesthetic mission to confront an urgent political reality.
That same year, South Africa was effectively excluded from the Biennale. The cultural boycott was widely understood as a refusal to legitimize apartheid through art and lasted for almost twenty years. In both cases, the Biennale recognized that neutrality itself was a political position – and took a side.
The past two years have exposed the fragility of any claim to universal human rights, as well as the inability of United Nations bodies to enforce them. They have also exposed uncomfortable geopolitical truths and caused painful rifts in personal and professional relationships, in the art world and beyond.
Within this context, the current attitude of the Venice Biennale exposes the cynicism of the art world. Where it once acted decisively, it now goes out of its way not to offend Israel and the United States. Doing so makes the country complicit in the ongoing genocide – despite the outrage of tens of thousands of artists and of the 40% of announced national pavilions that have signed ANGA’s letter calling for the exclusion of the Israeli pavilion. What remains is not resistance, but the aesthetic concealment of violence.
