Protests and politics will dominate this year’s Biennale

NO NATIONAL PAVILION in the latest Venice Biennale, which opens on April 23rd, will make such a brave and unambiguous statement as Russia’s. Its airy spaces will be empty, the curator and two artists chosen to represent Russia having withdrawn on February 28th in protest at the invasion of Ukraine.Politics is seldom distant from the world’s most prominent showcase for contemporary art. But this year it was not intended to be central. The Italian curator of the main show, Cecilia Alemani, had chosen to build it around shifting concepts of what it means to be human, and called it The Milk of Dreams after the title of a children’s book by a late Surrealist artist, Leonora Carrington. Yet there is every chance the Biennale, including 80 smaller, national exhibitions, will be dominated by the war.