Carabinieri are standing in front of the deserted Russian pavilion, which a Lithuanian curator was originally supposed to use, but who honorably refused after the start of the war.

They are intended to prevent angry visitors from daubing the building, which was built in the orthodox confectionery style.

The Ukrainian contribution to the Venice Biennale, on the other hand, is also under special scrutiny, albeit in a positive sense.

Politicians from all over the world parade past here every half hour and show their solidarity with blue and yellow ribbons and polished words.

The contribution is also rightly popular from an artistic point of view: Pavlo Makov installed a paradox with his “Fountain of Exhaustion”;

Dozens of bronze funnels direct water downwards,

Stefan Trinks

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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The nagging question remains: is art allowed to be enjoyed in times of war, or more disillusioned, can she do anything with her ambiguous voice while the guns are talking, or is it downright barbaric to look at an oil painting shortly after Bucha?

In any case, the Biennale has the blessing of the Ukrainian President - on Thursday at five in the afternoon Volodymyr Zelenskyj addressed the audience of the large-scale exhibition with his incendiary speech "Ukraine: Defending freedom" and defended - as an artist that he is - the right and the duty to their orientation.

The dream-vague style of the subconscious

None of the participating artists could predict what apocalyptic things would happen in Eastern Europe, and yet a large number of the works on view appear as if they were narrowed down to the war.

The

lingua franca

of the Biennale is surrealism, which curator Alemani specified with the title "The Milk of Dreams", but which was no longer able to influence the works that had already been created and selected for the most part.

For German ears, the exclaimed “Milk of Dreams”, borrowed from the surrealist Dorothea Tanning, has become rather nightmarish since Celan's “The Black Milk of the Morning”.

And yet the title precisely hits the vaguely dreamy style of the subconscious, which not only chose Sigmund Freud as the patron saint of wet and wild dream-making, but also opens up converted new materials for art.

Upside-down materials and a permanent exploration and enhancement of sensuality are the two cornerstones of the Biennale, and it is consistently impressive how the artists in Venice are now presenting ever new varieties of surrealistic material alienation.

As in the previous Biennials, many cheeky Davids win the battle against the Goliaths with their monumental pavilions in the Arsenale section of the show.

When it comes to sublimely apocalyptic shudders, the hall on the small island of Malta cannot be surpassed.

In the completely dark hall, fire literally falls from the unseen sky, true to the Apocalypse of St. John, which the artists Arcangelo Sassolino and Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci have studied intensively for many years.

It drips from the ceiling like viscous lava and hisses as it falls into pools of black water on the floor;

One sees in the mind's eye Goethe standing on Vesuvius, performing an inner St. Vitus dance of emotions at the eerily sublime sight.

This liquid Malta lava is iron liquefied at 1500 degrees,