Art: Venice Biennale: Gaza in the Giardini

When the “Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte della Città di Venezia” (First International Art Exhibition of the City of Venice) opened on April 30, 1895, the founding of the Israeli state was still more than half a century in the future. The modern political system had just emerged in Europe, and the exhibition series known today as the Venice Biennale was intended to represent the new national constellation in the artistic field.

Today, 129 years later, the Jewish state is – once again – the main topic of discussion at the show, which opens to all visitors on Saturday and is celebrating its 60th edition this year under the title “Foreigners Everywhere”. October 7th last year, when the radical Islamist Hamas invaded Israel and murdered over 1,000 people, also sent the art scene into turmoil. However, the number of expressions of solidarity with the Israelis was limited, and soon the focus was primarily on horror and indignation over Israel’s military actions in the Gaza Strip. This also applies to Venice: massive protests against the participation of the only democracy in the Middle East in the Biennale had already formed at the end of February. A group called the Art Not Genocide Alliance had started a petition against Israel’s participation; She accuses the country of genocide against the Palestinians. Their website currently has almost 24,000 signatures. The initiative points out that South Africa was banned from participating in the Biennale during the apartheid era, and that this year Russia, condemned by the Biennale for its war of aggression against Ukraine, is not taking part for the second time. (The fact that Russia gave its pavilion to Bolivia in exchange for lithium supplies is a curiosity that has so far received little attention.)

This is not the first time that Israel’s participation in the art event has met with strong resistance: in 1982, after Israeli troops invaded Lebanon, Italian leftists detonated a bomb in front of the Israeli pavilion; In 2015, the building was occupied by activists demonstrating against the working conditions of Palestinians in the West Bank. However, it is the first time that the Israeli pavilion will actually remain closed if the hostilities in Gaza do not stop. The artist Ruth Patir, who was supposed to represent the Jewish state with a critical work on the reproductive medicine that is widespread there, announced her withdrawal from the show last Tuesday. Only one of Patir’s films will be shown through a window. Only when a ceasefire has been reached and the approximately 130 Israeli hostages still held by Hamas have been freed should the pavilion open its doors. Patir and the two curators Tamar Margalit and Mira Lapidot assume that their actions will result in criticism from the Israeli government – especially since it was not informed in advance, as Margalit told the New York Times.

The Israeli artist, who regularly took to the streets in her home country against Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, has recently turned against her own state that sent her – but is that all? It is reasonable to assume that their sudden withdrawal also has something to do with security concerns. After all, the protest movement that has taken over the space in front of the pavilion is quite radical: the slogan “From the River to the Sea,” which denies the Jewish state the right to exist, can be heard, and anti-Semitic inflammatory pamphlets are distributed. Apparently no one there wants to know anything about a two-state solution.

And what are the Germans doing in the meantime, whose eliminatory anti-Semitism not so long ago made the establishment of a Jewish state more necessary than ever? The German pavilion still stands in its Third Reich form – in 1938 the building, which was built in 1909, was monumentally expanded by the Nazis – at first glance it appears undamaged in the Venetian Giardini. And this despite the fact that several artists have already attacked him.

Since Hans Haacke had the travertine floor inside the building destroyed in 1993, it has become an unwritten law for artists exhibiting here to deal with the history of the building, i.e. the history of National Socialism. In 2017, for example, Anne Imhof had young performers singing and dancing in dark techno sports outfits, guarded outside by roaming Dobermans. In a chilled atmosphere, it was possible to think about what club culture à la Berghain could have to do with soldierly Germanness – although the work entitled “Faust” unfortunately drew visitors more into its mystical spell than it was able to enlighten them about it. Maria Eichhorn’s work two years ago was more successful: after the artist initially planned to demolish the entire building, at least temporarily, she ultimately limited herself to digging up building foundations and removing layers of plaster from walls. This made it clear exactly where the Nazis were at work.

This year’s work in the German pavilion, on the other hand, appears comparatively vague. Yael Bartana, who lives as a multimedia artist between Tel Aviv and Berlin, denounces the ecological and political destruction of the earth, while the theater director Ersan Mondtag, whose grandfather came to Germany as a Turkish guest worker, deals with his migration story. Of course, both topics – environmental destruction and a migration society – are highly political, but they could have just as easily been dealt with in another place. In contrast, the monumental Nazi building calls for an ever-new confrontation with fascism – and the national exhibition, which seems somewhat antiquated in the age of a transnational art scene, provides the ideal ground for this. But perhaps it is a punch line that Bartana is the first Israeli to play in the German pavilion – at a time when the pavilion in her country of birth remains closed for the first time.