On May 6 — the first day of the preview of the 61st International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale — rain began falling over Venice before dawn. At the entrance to the Giardini, the city’s public gardens transformed each odd-numbered year into the ceremonial stage set of the international art world, visitors condemned to wait in endless lines were greeted not by the usual choreography of luxury branding and curatorial platitudes, but by a black protest tent decorated with the flags of Ichkeria (Chechnya), Tatarstan, and other opressed nations of the Russian Federation. The action, called “From the Margins of Empire to the Open Lagoon,” had been organized by Memorial Italia, Art Against Aggression, and the Free Nations League. Satirical paintings of Vladimir Putin hung at the entrance. Even before the Biennale gates opened, visitors and journalists had already had an indication that this year’s exhibition would unfold less as a celebration of contemporary art than as a political reckoning.
By 11 a.m., when the rain finally stopped, several dozen journalists carrying cameras, microphones, and television equipment had gathered in front of the Russian Pavilion. Nearby, a detachment of police officers equipped with anti-riot shields shifted nervously in place while the commissioner of the Venice police paced back and forth in visible agitation. Suddenly he spotted Katia Margolis — the intellectual force behind the anti-Russian protests — in the crowd and hurried toward her. Margolis calmly assured him that the demonstration would remain nonviolent.
Moments later, all semblance of order collapsed. Dozens of young women — some wearing pink balaclavas, others traditional Ukrainian flower wreaths — charged toward the crowd of journalists and police to the deafening sound of rock music, holding burning smoke flares in their hands. The Carabinieri instantly formed a defensive line sealing off the entrance to the Russian Pavilion. Thick pink smoke rose above the chaos as journalists struggled to capture images through the confusion. Pussy Riot and Ukrainian feminist collective Femen had launched their assault on what increasingly resembled not a national pavilion, but a besieged ideological bunker.
The smoke soon turned blue and yellow — the colors of the Ukrainian flag. The women danced on the steps of the pavilion, screaming anti-war slogans echoed by the crowd, while reporters shoved one another in pursuit of the photographs that would appear within hours across the front pages of the international press.
Thus opened In Minor Keys, the exhibition that was the brainchild of Koyo Kouoh, the first African woman appointed artistic director of the Venice Biennale. Kouoh, who died suddenly in May 2025, one year before the opening, could hardly have imagined that the exhibition she envisioned as an exploration of subtlety, intimacy, and fractured emotional registers would instead begin with clouds of smoke, riot police, and geopolitical confrontation. The rhythm of the Biennale no longer resembled a composition in minor keys. It had become a military march interrupted by explosions.
The cause of this transformation was the decision of Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, the director of the Venice Biennale, to invite the Russian Federation, Israel, and the Islamic Republic of Iran back to the exhibition. The decision was not merely provocative. It was politically unprecedented.
Buttafuoco himself embodied the political shift that had overtaken Italian cultural institutions under the government of Giorgia Meloni. A former activist of the Youth Front of the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement (Movimento Sociale Italiano), Buttafuoco built his career as a right-wing journalist and polemicist, cultivating a public image somewhere between decadent intellectualism and ideological provocation. In his writings he repeatedly expressed admiration for Vladimir Putin, whom he once described as “the only truly right-wing statesman.” His appointment to lead the Biennale always signaled a cultural project extending far beyond art itself: the attempt to reshape Italy’s major institutions according to the sensibilities of the nationalist right.
Russia had been absent from the Biennale since the beginning of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Israel’s pavilion had remained closed since 2024 amid growing protests over Gaza. Iran had not participated since the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Yet Buttafuoco framed their return as a heroic defense of artistic freedom against censorship. In practice, however, their invitation exposed a contradiction that the global art world had spent years trying to avoid confronting directly: contemporary art institutions increasingly speak the language of ethics while remaining structurally dependent on oligarchic money, authoritarian influence, and political opportunism. Venice merely made the contradiction visible.
The Islamic Republic of Iran withdrew days before the opening, apparently because events in the real Middle East had become more urgent than symbolic participation in the imaginary cosmopolitanism of the art world. Russia and Israel, by contrast, accepted enthusiastically. Moscow immediately recognized what Buttafuoco perhaps failed to understand: that the reopening of the Russian Pavilion offered the Kremlin not an artistic opportunity, but a geopolitical spectacle. After years of cultural isolation, Russia could now purport to be a legitimate participant in European civilization — not on the battlefield, but in the symbolic center of international culture.
When English journalist George Nelson revealed Russia’s participation in March, outrage spread almost instantly. A petition launched by Art Against Aggression on Change.org quickly gathered more than a thousand signatures from politicians, intellectuals, curators, and artists. Ukrainian officials publicly condemned the decision. Members of the European Parliament demanded the cancellation of Russian participation. What might once have remained an internal controversy within the art world rapidly escalated into an international political crisis.
The government of Giorgia Meloni immediately attempted to distance itself from the consequences of its own appointment. Italy’s Ministry of Culture issued an extraordinary disclaimer stating that the Biennale administration had acted in contradiction to the foreign policy of the Italian Republic. Alessandro Giuli, Italy’s Minister of Culture, publicly attacked Buttafuoco and called for the decision to be reconsidered. Simultaneously, twenty-two European culture ministers signed a joint appeal urging the Biennale leadership to reverse course.
The criticism escalated with astonishing speed. The European Commission formally warned the Biennale that it could suspend or revoke €2m in EU funding allocated through 2028 if the decision were not reversed. Italian opposition politicians described the reopening of the Russian Pavilion as a moral and political catastrophe. Then came the leaks. The newspapers Open and La Repubblica published correspondence between Biennale officials and Russian representatives dating back to 2025, raising the possibility that the Biennale itself had violated EU sanctions in negotiating Russia’s return. On April 30, the international jury of the Biennale resigned in protest.
Still Buttafuoco refused to retreat. He defended himself with the familiar rhetoric of artistic openness and anti-censorship, pretending not to understand — or perhaps understanding all too well — that the Russian Pavilion no longer functioned as a space of artistic representation in any meaningful sense. It had become an extension of Russian state spectacle, another instrument in the Kremlin’s long campaign to convert culture into geopolitical theater.
The irony was devastating. For decades the Venice Biennale had cultivated the illusion that contemporary art existed above politics, transcending borders and ideologies through the universal language of creativity. But in 2026 reality finally invaded exhibition grounds with unmistakable force. The smoke bombs outside the Russian Pavilion exposed what the Biennale had long tried to conceal: that art institutions are not neutral spaces standing outside history, but battlefields where power, money, ideology, and violence struggle for legitimacy under the guise of culture.
Buttafuoco fanned the flames. On the very first day of the preview he plunged the 131-year-old institution into the deepest existential crisis of its history.
The protests continued throughout the day. At the Polish Pavilion, the culture ministers of Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Moldova issued a joint statement condemning Russia’s participation and warning that their own countries might reconsider future involvement in the Biennale altogether. By evening, a group of Polish politicians led by Bartłomiej Sienkiewicz — an MEP and former Minister of Culture of Poland — demonstrated in front of the Russian Pavilion carrying banners reading: “Venice Biennale = Whitewashing Russian War Crimes” and “No EU Money for Biennale with Russia.” Russian opposition activists joined them, carrying white-blue-white anti-war Russian flags and chanting anti-Putin slogans. Riot police waited beside the pavilion but, unlike earlier in the day, did not immediately block access. This allowed aggressive pro-Russia provocateurs to move through the crowd photographing and intimidating protesters. For several hours the Biennale grounds resembled less an art exhibition than a miniature version of the political fractures tearing contemporary Europe apart.
On May 7, Pussy Riot organized another performance, attempting to march through Piazza San Marco toward the Biennale headquarters on the Grand Canal. Police prevented the action in the main square, but the women in pink balaclavas still reached Buttafuoco’s HQ and engulfed the façade in clouds of colored smoke. The imagery was almost too obvious: the headquarters of Europe’s oldest art exhibition disappearing behind the smoke of a political fire its own director had started.
The following day brought an even darker gesture. Danila Tkachenko — the Russian photographer and artist who had fled Russia after attempting to organize an anti-war action during the 2022 military parade on Red Square — arrived at Scuola Piccola Zattere, an art foundation financed by Viktoria Mikhelson, daughter of a Russian oligarch deeply connected to the military-industrial economy sustaining the war against Ukraine. There, Tkachenko carved the word “ART” into his own chest.
The action was a protest against what he called “art-laundering”: the transformation of Western cultural institutions into mechanisms for cleansing oligarchic money and authoritarian influence through the rhetoric of neutral cultural dialogue. It was impossible not to get the symbolism. In Venice, art no longer appeared as an autonomous realm of freedom or beauty. It had become a wound carved directly into the human body.
Obviously, it was not only Russian opposition artists who protested against the return of the Russian Federation to Venice. The Network of Ukrainian Associations organized an action titled “The Invisible Pavilion.” Zoia Zvynyatskivska, the project’s coordinator, distributed across the city mock posters announcing exhibitions, concerts, and literary readings by Ukrainian artists and poets killed during the war. Each poster was violently crossed out with the same sentence: “Canceled because the author was killed by Russia.” This was remarkably effective precisely because of its simplicity. Unlike the spectacular smoke performances of Pussy Riot and Femen, “The Invisible Pavilion” transformed absence itself into an exhibition. The dead artists, excluded forever from Venice, became the invisible participants of the Biennale.
It also became increasingly clear that not all Italians were prepared to accept the transformation of Venice into a stage for Russian cultural propaganda. On May 9, the political party Radicali Italiani organized a march from the Doge’s Palace to the entrance of the Biennale protesting against what participants described as the normalization of Putinist propaganda under the guise of artistic dialogue.
Significantly, unlike some demonstrations against the Israeli Pavilion — several of which escalated into clashes with police — the anti-Russian protests never descended into serious violence. The atmosphere remained tense, theatrical, and emotionally charged, but largely disciplined. This mattered. The protests against the Russian Pavilion were directed less against individual visitors than against the institutional decision to readmit the cultural representation of an openly aggressive state engaged in a full-scale war against Ukraine.
Despite the whirlwind of criticism, Buttafuoco also found supporters — and from unexpectedly different political and cultural quarters. On May 8, Matteo Salvini, leader of Lega Nord, deputy prime minister, and minister of infrastructure in the Meloni coalition government, visited the Biennale and deliberately stopped at the Russian Pavilion to declare that art should “remain immune from boycotts and bans.” Salvini also publicly criticized Italy’s minister of culture for refusing to attend the opening of the controversial exhibition. Coming from a politician long known for his sympathies toward Putin, such support was hardly surprising. More unexpected, however, was the stance taken by Emilia Kabakov, widow of the artist Ilya Kabakov.
During the opening of the Venetian Pavilion, Buttafuoco publicly thanked Emilia Kabakov for her advice and support. She was presenting The Venetian Diary, an installation she had allegedly put together with her late husband. In numerous interviews Kabakov had argued against the exclusion of the Russian Pavilion, essentially repeating Buttafuoco’s rhetoric about artistic freedom and the dangers of cultural censorship. The symbolism was painful. One of the central figures of late Soviet nonconformist art — a tradition historically built upon resistance to authoritarian pressure — was now being invoked in defense of the return of official Russian state representation during an ongoing war. The paradox revealed how profoundly the language of “dialogue” and “openness” could be appropriated to legitimize almost any political reality.
Many observers attempted to compare the 61st International Art Exhibition with the famous Biennale del Dissenso (“Biennale of Dissent”) of 1977. The comparison, however, was fundamentally misleading. In 1977 the Biennale gave visibility to dissident artists from the Soviet bloc who had been silenced by authoritarian regimes. In 2026 the dissent unfolded in the streets outside the pavilions themselves. Protesters were not demanding the inclusion of suppressed voices; they were protesting the institutional rehabilitation of states accused of war crimes and repression. The Russian and Israeli pavilions did not symbolize exclusion from Europe, but rather the inability of European cultural institutions to define the limits of moral accommodation.
This was not the Biennale of Dissent. It was the Biennale of Discontent.
In a sense, Putin’s Russia achieved an even greater success than it could realistically have anticipated. If Moscow’s cultural strategists hoped to stage the triumphant return of Russia to the European art scene after years of isolation, Buttafuoco handed them something far more valuable: chaos inside one of Europe’s oldest cultural institutions, open conflict among participating countries, pressure from the European Commission, and even visible fractures within the governing coalition of Giorgia Meloni herself. The Russian Pavilion no longer functioned merely as an exhibition space. It became a geopolitical detonator placed in the middle of the Giardini.
The final irony arrived on May 9. A screen suddenly appeared behind the glass entrance of the Russian Pavilion showing footage of the storming of the pavilion by Pussy Riot and Femen. The curators had apparently decided to transform the protests against their presence into a badge of honor — proof of their own supposed martyrdom in the name of artistic freedom. The appropriation was cynical but revealing: even opposition itself could be absorbed and recycled into spectacle.
Nadya Tolokonnikova, who had led the protest in the Giardini, reacted immediately. She publicly gave the pavilion administration twenty hours to remove the footage and reminded them of an exquisite irony. Under contemporary Russian law, Pussy Riot has been designated an extremist organization, and the dissemination of extremist materials is punishable by imprisonment. The Russian Pavilion, in effect, had accidentally turned itself into a violator of the very authoritarian legislation imposed by the state it claimed to represent.
Art historian, exhibition curator, investigative journalist. Lives in Kyiv.