Russia will not participate in the Venice Biennale 2024

It is official: Russia will not participate in the next Venice Biennale. Russia will therefore miss the Biennale for the second consecutive edition, again because of the war it has waged against Ukraine. For the 2022 edition, Russia was supposed to participate, and the project was already ready: then, on February 27, a few days after the start of the Russian invasion, the two artists Alexandra Sukhareva and Kirill Savchenkov and Lithuanian curator Raimundas Malašauskas had decided to leave the pavilion closed and thus not to open the already scheduled exhibition, entitled 914. “There is no place for art when civilians die under rocket fire, when citizens of Ukraine hide in shelters, and when those who protest in Russia are silenced,” Sukhareva had written on the occasion in a note.

No comment was leaked from the Venice Biennale, but Russia does not appear on the now-closed list of 90 national participations. So the pavilion, designed in 1914 by architect Aleksej ŠÄusev, will remain closed again this year. Those of 2022 and this year, however, are not Russia’s only absences in the Biennale’s history. In fact, the country skipped the 1922 edition, all those from 1938 to 1954, and those of 1978 and 1980.

Instead,Ukraine, which has participated in the Venice Biennale since 2003, will be there. It will be present in its space at the Arsenale with an exhibition entitled Net Making and curated by Viktoria Bavykina and Max Gorbatskyi, with works by Katya Buchatska, Andrii Dostliev, Lia Dostlieva, Daniil Revkovskyi, Andrii Rachynskyi, and Oleksandr Burlaka.

Pictured: the Pavilion of Russia at the Venice Biennale. Photo KASA - Alexandra Kovaleva/Kei Sato

Russia will not participate in the Venice Biennale 2024

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