The 61st Venice Biennale opened to the public on 9 May 2026 under circumstances that no institutional director, curator, or gallery representative could have anticipated at the start of the year. The world's oldest and most closely watched international exhibition of contemporary art arrived not with the usual fanfare of its preview days, but trailing a sequence of institutional ruptures — a jury resignation, a replacement awards system, mass artist withdrawals, street demonstrations, and a pavilion strike — that together amount to a structural challenge to how the Biennale confers value, and indeed whether such conferral retains credibility at all.
The Mass Withdrawal
On the day the Biennale opened to the public, 9 May 2026, a substantial portion of the participating artistic community published a collective statement on e-flux. "We, the undersigned artists from In Minor Keys, selected by Koyo Kouoh, artistic director of the 61st edition of La Biennale di Venezia, and from National Pavilions withdraw from consideration for the Visitor Lion awards. We do so in solidarity with the resignation of the jury selected by Koyo Kouoh."
Almost half of the 111 artists, duos, and collectives included in the central exhibition signed the statement, alongside teams representing 22 national pavilions. The signatories included artists of the standing of Walid Raad, Laurie Anderson, Alfredo Jaar, Alice Maher, Pio Abad, Zoe Leonard, and Tuan Andrew Nguyen. Among national pavilion signatories were France (Yto Barrada), Ireland (Isabel Nolan), Lithuania (Egle Budvytyte), the Netherlands (Dries Verhoeven), Belgium, Latvia, the United Arab Emirates, and Ecuador, among others. The number of withdrawing artists at 81 is approximately half of the central exhibition plus representatives from 22 national pavilions.
Indian photographer Sohrab Hura, whose film work is shown in the Arsenale, articulated the reasoning concisely when speaking to The Art Newspaper: "The jury acted like any conscionable people would have done. I'd rather support them than hope for some award."
Street Protests
The withdrawals were not the only form of dissent. The preview days were marked by a series of public protests in Venice, including a large march on the Friday before the public opening in which some pavilion artists, curators, and staff — including those from Japan, Finland, and the United Kingdom — briefly closed their pavilions to join demonstrators protesting Israel's presence at the event. The art collective Pussy Riot staged an action at the Russian pavilion, entering in pink balaclavas, setting off smoke flares, and chanting against Putin's government.
The broader atmosphere within the art world ahead of the opening had already been charged. As early as March, a group of 74 artists and curators in the main exhibition wrote to Biennale director Pietrangelo Buttafuoco objecting to the decision to relocate the Israeli Pavilion to the Arsenale, in proximity to In Minor Keys, arguing that the move contradicted Kouoh's curatorial vision. A separate open letter, circulated by the Art Not Genocide Alliance and gathering thousands of signatures, called on the Biennale Foundation to exclude Israel from the event. Australia's representative artist Khaled Sabsabi and curator Michael Dagostino had been dropped by their government's arts advisory body in February following accusations of antisemitism from right-wing politicians, only to be reinstated following substantial pushback from the arts community. Calls for the United States to be excluded were also circulating, with one letter signed by 74 artists and curators arguing that the current conditions demanded the exclusion of any official delegation from "current regimes committing war crimes, including Israel, Russia, and the United States."
What This Means
The first concerns the integrity of peer-evaluated award systems. The replacement of an expert jury with a public vote — however the Biennale chooses to frame it as democratic — is, structurally, a demotion of specialist judgement in favour of audience popularity. For institutions accustomed to framing awards as an endorsement of artistic merit assessed by informed peers, this shift is not simply procedural. It changes what a Biennale award means and, by extension, what value it carries when cited in the public records of participating artists, their galleries, and the institutions that collect their work.
The second question concerns the relationship between artist autonomy and institutional participation. When nearly half of a major international exhibition's artists decline to be considered for its primary award, they are not simply making a personal political statement. They are, collectively, recalibrating the terms under which artistry consents to institutional recognition. For galleries representing artists who withdrew, and for institutions whose collections include work by those artists, this is relevant biographical and contextual material that will be part of how this moment in contemporary art history is understood.
The third concerns the legacy of Koyo Kouoh's curatorial vision, which has become contested ground. The Biennale Foundation, the resigning jury, and the withdrawing artists all claim, in different ways, to be honouring her intentions. That three parties can invoke the same curatorial statement in support of contradictory positions tells us something about the condition of institutional authority in a period of acute geopolitical pressure — namely, that it is fragile, susceptible to rapid erosion, and dependent on trust that is very difficult to rebuild once it has been publicly withdrawn.
The 61st Venice Biennale remains open until 22 November 2026. The artistry it contains — assembled at considerable human cost by a team finishing work that Kouoh did not live to present — is, by multiple accounts from those who attended the preview, serious and considerable. The condition of the institution presenting it is considerably less stable. For professionals across the gallery and museum sector, this edition will be studied for some time, less as a case study in curatorial achievement than as a turning point in how the art world's most prominent prize structures withstand political pressure from every direction at once.