Venice artist faces boycott calls

The fight over Israel’s place at the 2026 Venice Biennale started long before the exhibition opens on May 9. In March, nearly 200 artists, curators, and art workers involved in this year’s edition signed a letter demanding that the Biennale cancel Israel’s pavilion. The letter was organized by the Art Not Genocide Alliance, or ANGA, and delivered to Biennale president Pietrangelo Buttafuoco and the board. Its argument was blunt: the Biennale should not give a national platform to the Israeli state while the war in Gaza continues (theartnewspaper.com, artnews.com). That demand landed because Venice is not just another art fair. The Biennale is built around national pavilions. Countries do not simply send artists. They stage themselves. This year’s exhibition, titled *In Minor Keys*, is still moving forward after the death of its curator, Koyo Kouoh, and La Biennale has confirmed that it will run from May 9 to November 22, with previews beginning May 6. It has also made clear that 99 national participations are going ahead. In other words, the argument is not about one artwork. It is about whether a state can use one of the art world’s most visible diplomatic stages at all (labiennale.org, labiennale.org). That structure is exactly why Belu-Simion Fainaru became the center of the dispute. Fainaru, a Romanian-born, Haifa-based sculptor who was announced in January as Israel’s representative, is not showing in Israel’s usual Giardini pavilion. That building is under renovation, so Israel’s 2026 presentation will instead appear in the Arsenale. His project is titled *Rose of Nothingness*. It centers on an installation of black water dripping from 16 pipes into a pool, drawing on Paul Celan’s image of “black milk” and on Kabbalistic symbolism. The work is steeped in memory, mysticism, and absence. It is also now impossible to separate from the politics around it (artnews.com, theartnewspaper.com). Fainaru answered the boycott calls this weekend. In a statement sent to ARTnews and picked up by *Artforum*, he said he does not support cultural boycotts and described art as a space for dialogue, openness, and human connection. That response matters because it puts him in direct continuity with the Biennale’s own defense. Last month, La Biennale said it rejects “any form of exclusion or censorship of culture and art” and cannot bar countries recognized by the Italian Republic from participating. The institution is trying to present this as a procedural question. It is not. The rule itself is political, because it turns Italy’s recognition of states into the gatekeeping mechanism for one of the world’s biggest art events (artnews.com, artforum.com, labiennale.org). The pressure is sharper because this is not a fresh controversy. At the 2024 Biennale, Israel’s artist Ruth Patir and her curators kept the pavilion closed from opening day, saying it would open only when there was a ceasefire and a hostage-release agreement. Even with the doors shut, the pavilion still became a protest site. ANGA and allied artists treated that closure not as the end of the issue, but as proof that the Biennale had already become unworkable on these terms. Their 2026 campaign is an escalation from protest to attempted exclusion, and from symbolic disruption to explicit boycott threats aimed at artists and audiences alike (theartnewspaper.com, artnews.com, hyperallergic.com). That is why this story is bigger than one pavilion. The Biennale likes to describe itself as a place where art rises above conflict. Its own format says the opposite. It organizes art through nations, flags, ministries, and official recognition. Once that machinery is in place, every pavilion becomes a test of what the institution is willing to normalize. This year, Israel’s contribution will open in the Arsenale, not in its renovated Giardini building, beside other national presentations and under the title *Rose of Nothingness*, with black water dripping one drop at a time into a dark pool (artnews.com, labiennale.org).