Venice Biennale 2026: minor keys, major horrors
The 2026 Venice Biennale came wrapped in the usual soft packaging of contemporary virtue. In Minor Keys was supposed to listen to the margins, amplify lateral voices, move away from the center.
Fine. But what Venice actually produced was not complexity. It was ideological kitsch. Because once you scrape off the poetry, the mechanism underneath looks brutally simple: moral grandstanding for some, indulgence for others, and a very precise appetite for the fashionable target of the season.
The Biennale itself declared that it rejects “any form of exclusion or censorship of culture and art” and presented Venice as a place of “dialogue, openness, and artistic freedom.” It also confirmed the presence of 100 national participations, including Russia, China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the first-ever participation of Qatar. In other words, this great temple of nuance had no principled problem welcoming states that are, to put it mildly, not exactly famous for democratic tenderness.
And yet, when it came to Israel, a large section of the Biennale world suddenly rediscovered the moral prestige of exclusion.
The call did not come from some vague internal memo or anonymous whispering campaign, but from ANGA — the Art Not Genocide Alliance — a collective of artists, curators, writers and cultural workers.
ANGA circulated a letter among Biennale participants and workers demanding that Israel be excluded from the 2026 Venice Biennale and insisting that artists and cultural workers should not be asked to share a platform with the Israeli state.
The text itself was the usual patchwork of degrading formulas — “apartheid,” “settler colonialism,” “genocide” — less an argument than a ritual of defamation. And it was backed not only by named signatories, but also by a long tail of anonymous ones, which pushes the whole exercise into an uglier infamous tradition: the anonymous accusatory letter, the moral denunciation without responsibility, the calumny disguised as virtue. That is always how exclusion begins — with labels, with lists, with the pleasure of isolating the designated impure.
Among the signatories were Caroline Dumalin, curator of the Belgian pavilion, Miet Warlop, artist of the Belgian pavilion, and Yto Barrada, artist of the French pavilion. This is an important detail, because these were not random agitators yelling from outside the gates. They were official participants in national pavilions. Belgium’s pavilion is headed by a Flemish government commissioner, Caroline Gennez, with Dumalin as curator and Warlop as exhibitor. France’s pavilion is commissioned by the Institut français, acting for the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs and the French Ministry of Culture, with Myriam Ben Salah as curator and Barrada as exhibitor.
In plain language: people selected, endorsed and publicly financed by the states they represent, paid ultimately by Belgian and French taxpayers, using that platform to demand the exclusion of one state while happily remaining inside a Biennale open to many others.
This is where the whole minor key symphony becomes comic. Venice was open enough for Tehran, Riyadh, Beijing, Doha and Moscow, all under the noble banner of dialogue. But for Israel, suddenly, the vocabulary changed: no dialogue, no coexistence, no complexity, no ambiguity, no patient curatorial listening to non-central narratives. Just expulsion. It takes a very particular kind of intelligence to call that anti-colonial sophistication rather than what it more plainly resembles: selective political illiteracy with good typography.
And the Russian case made the hypocrisy even harder to hide. The European Commission threatened to withdraw funding if the Biennale moved ahead with Russia’s return, and more than twenty European foreign and culture ministers objected. Reuters reported that the EU warned against giving a platform to individuals who actively supported or justified the Kremlin’s aggression. But Biennale president Pietrangelo Buttafuoco defended the line of openness anyway, describing the festival as a space of coexistence for the whole planet, without censorship, even for countries in conflict. Admirable universalism, apparently—just not for Israelis.
Then there is the local farce. The main exhibition announced 110 invited participants from “many geographies and regions.” None of them, in the international exhibition proper, were Italian. That alone would already have been a delicious symbol: Venice, in Italy, under Italian institutional authority, staging a global sermon on margins while managing to make Italy itself disappear from the room.
And presiding over the fiasco was Pietrangelo Buttafuoco — for non-Italians, not some respected builder of major art institutions, but a Sicilian polemicist who converted to Islam, built his notoriety in politics and television, published several panegyrics to Berlusconi, and has long moved in that very Italian swamp of loyalty, spectacle and indulgence toward Mafia figures such as Marcello Dell’Utri and Totò Cuffaro. In 2026 he even managed to open a clash with current culture minister Alessandro Giuli over Russia’s return to the Biennale.
The result was perfectly in character: not an exhibition governed by standards, but a display of political ambiguity and provincial arrogance. A Biennale obsessed with the rhetoric of minorities that ended up serving as a platform for one of the oldest European reflexes of all: discovering that Jews somehow count as a minority only until they become inconvenient.
That is the real sound of In Minor Keys. Not subtlety. Not listening. Not marginality.
Just the old European orchestra, slightly retuned, performing selective conscience in a softer register — and increasingly resembling a recruitment salon where artists and curators display the right postures, slogans and obedient indignations in the hope of catching the eye of Qatari and Saudi fortunes. Not, needless to say, for artistic reasons.
