Venice Biennale: Ukrainian Art Exhibition Opens In Shadow Of War

On Thursday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky opened an exhibition about defending his country’s freedom at the Venice Biennale festival.

Speaking via video link, he said “art can tell the world things that cannot be shared otherwise”.

His country’s culture is a focus of attention in Venice and artworks have been escorted out of Ukraine by police.

In contrast, the Russian Pavilion stood locked and empty; a sign of the country’s isolation.

President Zelensky described the pain of war as he addressed the world’s oldest and most prestigious contemporary art exhibition earlier this week.

He offered examples of Ukrainian soldiers finding murdered civilians in Bucha, of medics rescuing injured people in Kharkiv, and of a girl writing a letter to her mother who died in Mariopul as experiences that can be best reflected in art, “because this is about something beyond words”.

As he talked of his country’s fight for freedom, he said: “There are no tyrannies that would not try to limit art. Because they can see the power of art. It is art that conveys feelings.”

Ukraine’s art is taking centre stage at the Venice Biennale, which has made a space at the heart of the Giardini for what is effectively a temporary pavilion for Ukraine.

There is a pile of sandbags, mirroring the sandbags being used in Ukraine to protect artworks, and a scorched structure covered in posters of war-related art work.

The official Ukrainian Pavilion in the nearby Arsenale shows a work by artist Pavlo Makov that nearly didn’t make it to Venice.

Called The Fountain of Exhaustion, it’s a series of funnels arranged in a triangle through which water drips and divides. Makov described it to me as a metaphor for “the exhaustion of humanity, the exhaustion of democracy”.