Art in the shadow of politics

Is politics suppressing art? A few days before the most important week of the year in the European cultural calendar, it's hard to shake that impression. The Venice Biennale opens its doors to the public on Saturday, but ahead of the world's biggest contemporary art event, there has been little talk about the works that will be on display in the national pavilions, and much more about which pavilions will open their doors - or should not.

The building housing the Russian national exhibition was open to the press on Tuesday, with techno music blaring from inside, for the first time since the start of the general invasion of Ukraine. It was a decision that the Biennale’s president, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, apparently made against the wishes of the Italian government that appointed him, and could cost the festival two million euros in EU funds for ethical violations. Russia has not participated in the previous two editions because of the war in Ukraine. The doors of its pavilion will be closed to the public when the Biennale fully opens on 9 May, a move a Ukrainian official told the Guardian as a “significant step” after the Biennale’s jury resigned en masse in April in protest at applications from countries whose leaders are the subject of international arrest warrants.

The Israeli pavilion will open, despite protests from 200 artists, curators and cultural workers participating in the Biennale, who claim that its opening gives a platform to a state that is carrying out genocide and cultural erasure.

The South African pavilion will not display anything, but the artist who was supposed to fill it will exhibit her work in a church near the Giardini, after the national government blocked it with unconvincing objections to the work, dedicated to a Palestinian poet killed in an Israeli airstrike.

The Iranian pavilion, meanwhile, will remain closed - a decision announced by Tehran the day before the journalists' visit, without giving a reason, but it is assumed to be related to the war with the US and Israel.

Art itself seems to have become a secondary issue. For the first time in four decades, neither the Golden nor the Silver Lion will be awarded, as the awards jury collectively resigned after initially announcing that it would not award the prize to Israel or Russia, after the International Criminal Court indicted them for crimes against humanity.

It's a similar picture at the Eurovision Song Contest, which is gearing up for the semi-finals on Tuesday and Thursday and the grand final in Vienna on May 16. If you don't know who the big favorites are, it's because the most talked about thing is who won't be in town for the 70th anniversary of the world's biggest live music event: Ireland, Spain, the Netherlands, Iceland and Slovenia are staying home, in protest of Israel being allowed to compete.

But there is a counterargument to the claim that political polarization is making it impossible to talk about artistic value. And it begins next Wednesday on the Côte d’Azur. This year’s Cannes Film Festival has so far been marked by an almost complete absence of political turmoil and boycott letters. There are noticeably fewer Hollywood films in the main competition this year, although this seems more a sign of American studios’ withdrawal from critical scrutiny of the festival circuit than a political message. The abundance of French films set during the Vichy regime could still be controversial, judging by the harsh reactions to the recent collaborationist film “Les Rayons et les Ombres,” which left-wing media outlets have criticized for, in their view, overly relativizing those who voluntarily served the Nazi death machine.

The main difference, of course, is that Venice and Eurovision are events similar to the Olympics or the World Cup, based on the idea that artists represent competing countries, while Cannes is a global marketplace that happens to be held in the south of France. Representing Israel in Venice is Béla-Simion Fajnăru, a Bucharest-born artist who previously represented Romania at the Biennale. His installation, “The Rose of Nothingness,” includes a water dropper used to irrigate fields, and has been criticized for celebrating the idea that Israel “made the desert bloom” while denying the reality in which access to water is used as a means of coercion against Palestine. Fajnăru insists that he is in Venice as a freelance artist, not as a representative of the Israeli government, but given the funding structures for national pavilions, the distinction is not so clear-cut.

Perhaps the problem is not that art is becoming more politicized, but that it is becoming more globalized, making the prism of national identity increasingly useless. This very understanding seems to be behind the recently announced changes to the Oscar nomination rules, according to which the award for best international feature film will now be attributed to the director, not the country of origin.

Among the most anticipated new releases at this year's Cannes Film Festival will be films by Iranian director Asghar Farhadi, shot in Paris with a French cast; by exiled Russian director Andrei Zvyagintsev, a co-production between France, Latvia and Germany; by Pavel Pawlikowski, shot in Poland with a German cast; and by Romanian auteur Cristian Mungiu, set in Norway and filmed there.

Text taken from The Guardian

Translation: NB