Artist Anish Kapoor called for the United States to be banned from the 2026 edition of the Venice Biennale while also applauding the jury’s recent decision to resign en masse.
In an interview with the Guardian, Kapoor called the jury’s decision “courageous” and further criticized the US. “I would hope that [the jury] might have also excluded the United States for its abhorrent politics of hate and its incessant warmongering,” he said.
While the jury did not explicitly say it had done so due to the inclusion of Israel and Russia in the exhibition, it had previously released a statement saying it would not consider for awards any national pavilions by countries who currently charged with crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court.
Controversy has swirled around the Venice Biennale in recent months, both for Israel and Russia’s returns to the event, as well as the pick of artist Alma Allen for the US Pavilion. Dozens of artists within “In Minor Keys,” the main show of the Biennale, as well as some curatorial advisers involved in the show’s curation, signed an open letter calling for the exclusion of all three pavilions.
The Biennale has claimed it does not have the right to exclude any nation recognized in Italy from participating, nad that it “rejects any form of exclusion or censorship of culture and art.”
Russia is participating for the first time since the start of its invasion of Ukraine in 2022. In 2024, Russia turned over its pavilion to Bolivia instead of participating.
Israel will present a pavilion inside the Arsenale, rather than at its pavilion in the Giardini, which it said needs renovatinos. The nation’s pavilion became a stage for numerous demonstrations and protests throughout the 2024 edition of the Biennale. Ruth Patir, the artist selected for that pavilion, refused to open the exhibition, saying she would not do so until all hostages taken by Hamas were released and a ceasefire was reached in Gaza. Neither of those events happened during the 2024 Biennale, and so it never opened.
