Israel’s Biennale artist speaks out
Belu‑Simion Fainaru, the artist representing Israel at the 2026 Venice Biennale, has publicly responded to calls for the country’s exclusion, making the pavilion a focal point in the festival’s political debates. Coverage in both ARTnews and Artforum captures the artist’s response and the broader call‑and‑countercall over cultural boycotts, so the Biennale’s art program will be contested as much by geopolitics as by curatorial choices this year. That tension will affect how audiences and institutions frame the shows. ( )
The fight over Israel’s place at the 2026 Venice Biennale is no longer a side argument. It is part of the exhibition now. This week, Belu-Simion Fainaru, the artist chosen to represent Israel, answered growing demands that the country be excluded from the world’s biggest art show. He rejected the idea outright. “I do not support cultural boycotts,” he told ARTnews, framing art as a space for dialogue rather than punishment (artnews.com). That response landed because the pressure on the Biennale had already become organized, public, and impossible to ignore. The campaign against Israel’s participation did not come from outside the event alone. In March, nearly 200 artists, curators, and art workers involved in the 2026 Biennale signed a letter demanding that organizers cancel Israel’s pavilion, arguing that the exhibition should not platform the Israeli state during the war in Gaza (theartnewspaper.com). ARTnews reported that dozens of artists in the main exhibition signed on, along with two advisers appointed by the late curator Koyo Kouoh, and that a second letter widened the target list to include the United States and Russia (artnews.com; news.artnet.com). That matters because it shifts the dispute from protest at the gates to dissent from inside the show. The Biennale’s answer has been blunt. Organizers said in March that they cannot exclude countries recognized by Italy and that the institution rejects “any form of exclusion or censorship of culture and art” (artnews.com). That line sounds procedural, but it is also political. It turns the argument into a clash between two ideas of what an art exhibition is for. One side treats national participation as a form of state legitimation. The other treats the exhibition as a forum that must stay open even when states are at war. Fainaru’s statement fits squarely into the second camp. His own project was already going to draw scrutiny before he spoke. ARTnews reported in January that Israel’s 2026 presentation will not be in its usual Giardini pavilion, which is under construction, but in the Arsenale instead (artnews.com). Fainaru’s exhibition, titled *Rose of Nothingness*, centers on an installation of 16 pipes dripping black water into a pool, drawing on Paul Celan’s image of “black milk” and on Kabbalistic symbolism (artnews.com). A work about memory, absence, and time was always likely to be read through the war. Now it will also be read through the boycott campaign surrounding it. That is partly because this is not a fresh controversy. In 2024, Israel’s pavilion became one of the defining flashpoints of the last Biennale when artist Ruth Patir and her curators kept it closed, saying it would open only when there was a ceasefire and a hostage-release deal (ocula.com; artnews.com). The current campaign is a continuation of that battle, not a new one. The venue has changed. The artist has changed. The underlying question has not. All of this is unfolding inside a Biennale that was already marked by loss and instability. The 61st edition, titled *In Minor Keys*, will run from May 9 to November 22, 2026, using the curatorial framework developed by Koyo Kouoh before her death in May 2025 (labiennale.org). Kouoh’s team is carrying that exhibition forward. But one of the loudest stories around it now is not about her theme, or even about the art in the central exhibition. It is about a national presentation relocated to the Arsenale, where black water will drip from 16 pipes into a pool while the argument outside keeps getting louder (artnews.com).
