The war has also arrived in Venice.

Just a few years ago, the yachts of the art-collecting oligarchs crowded in front of the Giardini, where the 59th Art Biennale opened this weekend – Sonia Boyce, Simone Leigh and Katharina Fritsch received the Golden Lion for their life’s work;

now the quays are empty save for two boats and a harmless French pleasure boat named Michelangelo.

A huge blue and yellow banner is waving at the Scuola Grande della Misericordia, on which the sentence “We are defending our freedom” can be read in the handwriting of the Ukrainian President Selenskyj.

Nicholas Mak

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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Here, the collector and entrepreneur Victor Pinchuk organized an exhibition with works by Ukrainian artists, Damien Hirst decorated a blue and yellow picture with butterflies for the solidarity show, and the painter Lesia Khomenko is showing life-size portraits of Ukrainian men who, with a military salute, are ready for service report at the gun.

Not long ago, it would have been unthinkable that visitors to a Biennale in 2022 would shudder with respect before portraits of warriors in heroic poses.

In the Giardini, the main venue of the Art Biennale, the Russian pavilion is empty.

The curators had resigned because of the war, now a security guard patrols the building and makes sure that nobody writes anything on the facade.

Only the ornate year “1914” can be read there;

now one thinks of the beginning of a world war.

Art biennials have always been held in times of war.

Even in the summer of 1942, when Hitler was in the Werwolf headquarters in Ukraine and the Wehrmacht was conquering the Crimea, an art show was shown in Venice and champagne was drunk in front of sculptures.

The question naturally arose in the run-up to this Biennale: Can we celebrate here when mass graves are being dug in Eastern Europe?

The answer in Venice is: you can.

At the opening of an exhibition by the action artist Hermann Nitsch on the Giudecca, more than a hundred guests dined in front of the blood-red pouring pictures, after which a DJ played the disco cracker "Welcome to St. Tropez", and a few Austrian real estate dealers twirled contentedly on the dance floor.

Party!

The next morning, the news came that Nitsch had died that night at home.

play with identities

Because it is emptier than usual in front of the Giardini, things stand out that are otherwise easily overlooked - the sculpture of the "Partigiana", for example, a bronze figure half submerged in the water in front of the Giardini, dedicated to the women fighters against National Socialism.

The German contribution this year is also about the forms and locations of resistance: Yilmaz Dziewior, curator of the German pavilion, invited the artist Maria Eichhorn to design the pavilion that was remodeled by the National Socialists in 1938 and on which many artists worked hard .

One of their plans was to completely tear down the building and rebuild it elsewhere.

That would not have been entirely in line with the Biennale's efforts to achieve climate neutrality, but according to Dziewior it would have been possible with special cranes.

The transfer would have opened up the view of the lagoon and invited reflection on the meaning of national representation;

in the end, however, the pavilion stayed in its place.

Nevertheless, Eichhorn deconstructed it very intelligently.

The ground has broken up like a tomb