Artist demands truce and release of hostages to open Israeli pavilion at the Venice Biennale

Venice. The artist and the curators representing Israel at this year’s Venice Biennale announced last Tuesday that they will not open the exhibition in their country’s pavilion until there is a ceasefire in Gaza and an agreement to free the hostages.

Their decision was announced on a sign in the window of the Israeli pavilion on the first day of media presentations, just days before the contemporary art fair begins on Saturday.

Israel is among the 88 national participants in the 60th Venice Biennale that will conclude on November 24. The exhibition at the Israel Pavilion by artist Ruth Patir is titled Motherland.

The organizers of the Biennale did not immediately comment; Even before the presentation to the media, thousands of artists, curators and art critics had signed an open letter asking the Biennale to exclude the Israeli pavilion from the fair in protest of Tel Aviv’s war in Gaza. Those opposed to Israel’s presence had also promised to protest at the site.

The Italian culture minister had strongly backed Israeli participation and the fair was scheduled to begin amid unusually tight security measures.

Patir’s statement, written in English, said: The artist and curators of the Israeli pavilion will open the exhibition when a ceasefire agreement and the release of hostages are reached. Two Italian soldiers stood guard nearby.

Adriano Pedrosa, the Brazilian curator of the main exhibition at the Biennale, praised Patir’s decision. She is very brave and very wise, because it is very difficult to present a work in this context.dijo Pedrosa a The Associated Press.

The national pavilions in Venice are independent from the main exhibition and each country decides what to show, which may or may not fit with the curator’s vision.

Some Palestinian artists are participating in parallel events in Venice and the works of three of them are scheduled to be part of Pedrosa’s main exhibition, titled Strangers Everywhere (Foreigners everywhere) and that emphasizes artists from the global South.

Pedrosa, the artistic director of the Sao Paulo Museum of Art in Brazil, said that one of the Palestinian artists, Khaled Jarrar, based in New York, would not be physically in Venice because he had not obtained a visa.

The war in Gaza broke out after a cross-border attack by Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants on October 7 in Israel, in which 1,200 people were killed and 250 kidnapped.

Israel responded with an offensive in the Gaza Strip that has killed 33,700 Palestinians so far, according to local health officials, and caused widespread destruction. The United Nations has warned of imminent famine in northern Gaza.