The deepening confrontation over Russia’s planned return to the Venice Biennale reached a new inflection point on March 19 when the mayor of Venice, Luigi Brugnaro, issued a direct warning that the city would close the Russian Pavilion if Moscow deploys it as a vehicle for state propaganda — a declaration that sharpens the most consequential dispute to engulf the world’s oldest and most important contemporary art exhibition in decades.
“If the Russian government were to carry out propaganda, we would be the first to close the pavilion,” Brugnaro told the Ansa news agency, according to reporting by The Art Newspaper and ARTnews. He was speaking at the unveiling of the Biennale’s newly renovated Central Pavilion, a €31 million project completed after sixteen months of reconstruction. Yet even as he drew the line on propaganda, the mayor struck a conciliatory posture on the broader question of Russian participation. “I am pro-Ukrainian, we have twinned Venice with Odessa, and Russia is the aggressor, but we are not at war with the Russian people, and art is open,” Brugnaro said, according to the ANSA wire service, adding that he and Italy’s culture minister held “differing visions” on the matter.
The crisis has been building since the Venice Biennale Foundation, on March 4, published the line-up for its sixty-first edition — ninety-nine nations in all, including seven first-time participants — with Russia quietly listed among them, according to the Associated Press. Russia’s return under its own flag marks its first official appearance since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. In that year, the Russian pavilion’s own artists and curator shuttered the exhibition in protest; in 2024, Moscow ceded the building to Bolivia.
The exhibition planned for the Russian Pavilion in the Giardini is titled “The Tree is Rooted in the Sky,” according to Ukrainska Pravda and ARTnews. It will feature more than fifty young musicians, poets, and philosophers from Russia and several other countries, including Argentina, Brazil, Mali, and Mexico, in a musical festival format. The programme’s title draws from the work of the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil, according to The Art Newspaper. The project is curated by Anastasia Karneeva, whose appointment has become a focal point for critics.
Karneeva’s personal connections to the Russian security apparatus have drawn intense scrutiny. According to The Art Newspaper and United24 Media, she is the daughter of Nikolay Volobuyev, a former Federal Security Service general and the current deputy chief executive of Rostec, Russia’s state-owned defence contractor. Karneeva co-founded the art consulting company Smart Art in 2014 with Ekaterina Vinokurova, the daughter of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, according to the same reporting. These ties have led critics to argue that the pavilion amounts less to an exercise in cultural exchange than to an extension of state power.
The political fallout within Italy itself has been swift and severe. The Associated Press reported that Culture Minister Alessandro Giuli fired Tamara Gregoretti, the ministry’s representative on the Biennale’s board of directors, accusing her of failing to disclose Russia’s intended participation and of supporting its inclusion without informing the government. According to ARTnews, the ministry stated that Gregoretti “did not deem it necessary to announce the possible presence of the Russian Federation at the next Biennale,” despite the acute international sensitivity of the issue. Italian media outlets, as reported by ARTnews, indicated that Gregoretti had shown no intention of stepping down. In a statement reported by Finestre sull’Arte, Gregoretti said she was “serene” and had acted in compliance with the Biennale’s statutes and the institution’s autonomy.
Giuli’s actions were accompanied by a broader investigative demand. The Associated Press reported that the minister launched an inquiry to determine whether Russia’s participation was compatible with the European Union sanctions regime and demanded that the Biennale urgently produce all documentation — including correspondence with Moscow — regarding the pavilion’s installation and management. He also spoke by telephone with his Ukrainian counterpart, Deputy Prime Minister and Culture Minister Tetyana Berezhna, who told him that Russia’s participation was “unacceptable for Kiev,” according to the Associated Press.
The confrontation has reverberated well beyond the lagoon. Twenty-two European countries — among them France, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, and Ukraine — signed a letter to Biennale president Pietrangelo Buttafuoco demanding that Russia be excluded, according to EUToday and Ocula. The initiative was led by Latvian Culture Minister Agnese Lāce, as reported by United24 Media. The signatories warned that Moscow could exploit the Biennale to “project an image of legitimacy and international acceptance that stands in stark contrast to the reality of Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine and the destruction of Ukrainian cultural heritage,” the Associated Press reported.
The European Commission escalated the pressure further. In a joint statement issued on March 10, EU technology commissioner Henna Virkkunen and culture commissioner Glenn Micallef warned that the Biennale’s decision was “not compatible with the EU’s collective response to Russia’s brutal aggression,” according to ARTnews. They threatened to suspend or terminate approximately €2 million in EU grant funding to the Biennale Foundation, according to Ocula and Finestre sull’Arte.
Buttafuoco, for his part, has refused to yield. The Biennale president has framed the decision as a defense of institutional autonomy and artistic freedom, stating that the organization “rejects any form of exclusion or censorship of culture and art,” according to ARTnews. In a letter published by the Italian newspaper Il Foglio, according to The Art Newspaper, Buttafuoco announced that the 2026 edition would include a space commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Carlo Ripa di Meana’s Biennale del Dissenso, a landmark 1977 series of exhibitions that showcased dissident artists from the Soviet bloc. The 2026 iteration, Buttafuoco said, would feature “five current figures who are highly unpopular with their governments: the US, Israel, China, Russia and even the EU.”
Russia’s cultural envoy, Mikhail Shvydkoy, has maintained that the pavilion will proceed as planned. “I would like to note that Russia never left the Venice Biennale,” Shvydkoy wrote in an email to ARTnews, framing the participation not as a return but as a continuation of Russian cultural presence. He added that “no one can deprive Russia of the right to artistic self-expression,” according to ARTnews.
The opposition, however, continues to build. An online petition titled “Stop the Normalization of War Crimes Through Art,” authored by the Arts Against Aggression International Movement and published on Change.org, had gathered more than 6,500 verified signatures as of March 10, according to The Art Newspaper. The petition’s signatories include former World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov, Vice-President of the European Parliament Pina Picierno, and the director of the National Art Museum of Ukraine in Kyiv, according to Hyperallergic. The dissident Russian punk collective Pussy Riot, whose members are classified as extremists under Russian law, challenged the Biennale’s posture directly, stating that “accommodating official state representation while curating ‘dissent’ risks turning the latter into a performative gesture,” according to The Art Newspaper.
The affair carries implications well beyond the precincts of the art world. For the United States and its allies, the question of whether a NATO member state’s premier cultural institution should provide a platform to a belligerent power — one whose military campaign in Ukraine has destroyed more than seventeen hundred cultural heritage sites and inflicted an estimated $4.2 billion in damage to the country’s cultural sector, according to Ukrainian government figures cited by NV.ua — is a matter of strategic coherence. The Western sanctions architecture, painstakingly constructed since 2022 to constrain Russia’s capacity for waging war, depends for its efficacy not only on trade restrictions and asset freezes but on the denial of the very legitimacy that prestigious international platforms confer.
The Biennale opens May 9 and runs through November 22, with ninety-nine nations participating. Whether the Russian Pavilion in the Giardini — a structure that has stood since 1914, built, as the Ukrainian art critic Kostiantyn Doroshenko noted to The Art Newspaper, with the money of the Ukrainian patron Bogdan Khanenko — will open its doors under the Russian tricolor this spring, or stand shuttered once more, remains an unresolved question that now implicates not merely the governance of an art fair but the coherence of the Western response to Russian aggression.