Russia’s participation in the Venice Biennale has aroused strong opposition.

Russian participation in the Venice Biennale has sparked strong opposition since the Biennale decided on Wednesday to allow the country to return to the event.

According to the AFP news agency, among others, the Prime Minister of Italy Giorgia Melonin the government announced its opposition to Russia’s entry into the event. Lithuania’s foreign minister called the matter “creepy”.

Held every other year, the Venice Biennale is a prestigious international exhibition of contemporary art. Russia has not been involved since it invaded Ukraine in 2022.

On Friday, a cross-party group of European lawmakers published a letter addressed to the organizers of the biennale, stating that Russia’s participation is “unacceptable”.

“Such a choice threatens to legitimize an administration responsible for ongoing violence. This will inevitably damage the reputation and moral standing of the Biennale itself,” the letter said.

Russian after the attack on Ukraine, the Venice Biennale banned all those connected to the Russian government from participating in the 2022 Biennale. The country also did not participate in the next event in 2024, but this year the permit expired.

“The Venice Biennale is an open institution” and it “rejects any form of exclusion or censorship of culture and art,” the biennale’s organizers said in a statement on Wednesday.

Politicon by The Italian Ministry of Culture says that the Biennale decided on Russia’s participation independently, despite the government’s opposition.

Started as director of the biennale in 2024 Pietrangelo Buttafuoco defended the decision and told the Italian media about the exhibition’s “space of peace”, where art overcomes geopolitics.

He also confirmed that in addition to Russia, Iran, Israel, Ukraine and Belarus will also participate in the event.

“We believe that where there is art, there is dialogue,” Buttafuoco told La Repubblica newspaper, according to AFP.

Russian president Vladimir Putin special representative of international cultural cooperation Mihail Shvydkoi said, according to Politico, that Russia’s participation is “further proof that Russian culture is not isolated and that attempts by Western political elites over the past four years to ‘cancel’ it have not succeeded.”

“Unfortunately, no one who has been in international cultural projects in the last four years is very surprised, because Russia has always found ways to get to important places in one way or another”, the second curator of the Ukraine Pavilion at the Venice Biennale Ksenia Malykh quoth.

The Venice Biennale lasts from May to November.