MAJOR DRAMA: IN MINOR KEYS
Archival image of the 1968 Venice Biennale protests, originally published in contemporary press archives.
Protest is not a new phenomenon in the historical memory of the Venice Biennale. In the immediate aftermath of the global student movements of 1968, artists joined forces with protesting students and threatened the biennial administration with setting the pavilions on fire. Under the slogan “Down with the biennial of the bosses,” the movement directly challenged the biennial’s entanglement with the art market. Until then, artworks had been openly sold within the exhibition grounds; following these protests, however, direct sales within the biennial came to an end. This shift made it increasingly visible that the biennial functioned not merely as an artistic platform, but also as an economic and political structure. From that point onward, artworks associated with the biennial were no longer sold openly within the pavilions; instead, sales migrated beyond the exhibition grounds into private dinners and exclusive gatherings.
IN MINOR KEYS
Some 58 years later, in the lead-up to the 61st Venice Biennale, biennial workers, curators, and artists began organizing online for months under the name ANGA (Art Not Genocide Alliance). As these tensions unfolded, the biennial’s curator Koyo Kouoh passed away on April 10; less than two weeks later, on April 22, the resignation of the biennial jury was announced.
The movement, whose signatories included Başak Doğa Temür, curator of the Turkish Pavilion, called for the suspension of countries accused of committing war crimes from participation in the biennial. Signed by 45 artists (three of whom chose to remain anonymous), the campaign quickly gained momentum among art workers and curators alike. Mercedes Vilardell, one of the biennial’s principal supporters, also endorsed the call.
On the opening day of the biennial preview, May 6, 2026, an anti-Russian protest led by Nadya Tolokonnikova and supported by FEMEN unfolded in front of the Russian Pavilion. Following this, as part of the ANGA movement, slogans were chanted across various pavilions with the participation of artists, while Palestinian flags were hung on artworks and exhibition walls. As the protests quickly spilled into the streets, more than 25 pavilions were temporarily closed to visitors on the very first day. The Turkish Pavilion joined the movement on May 8 as part of a 24-hour strike.
After ANGA’s call for the suspension of Israel’s participation in the biennial did not lead to any action, new demands emerged calling for Israel and Russia to be barred from attending the “Visitor Lions” award ceremony. On May 9, the biennial’s official opening day, more than 81 artists announced their withdrawal from the award competition.
Pussy Riot and FEMEN gather outside the Russian Pavilion on the Venice Biennale, May 6, 2026.
MAJOR DRAMA: THE TURKISH PAVILLION
This year, Türkiye is represented by Nilbar Güreş, a queer artist who has lived in Vienna for nearly 25 years. Over the course of her career, Güreş has participated in numerous major international biennials, including the Istanbul Biennial, the Sao Paulo Biennial, the Sydney Biennale, the Berlin Biennale, and the Seoul Mediacity Biennale. Working across textile, video, photography, and installation, her practice frequently explores questions of migration, identity, body politics, queer representation, and cultural belonging. Unlike many artists based in Türkiye, Güreş’s works are also presented for sale at international art fairs such as Art Basel and Frieze. According to the artist’s own statements, she was invited by İKSV at the end of August 2025 to represent Türkiye at the biennial. She selected Başak Doğa Temür, a friend from her graduate studies in Vienna, as curator, and produced the works for the biennial within just ten weeks.
In response to journalist Elif Tanrıyar’s question in the Turkish publication Gazete Oksijen, “What did you feel when you learned that you would represent Türkiye at the Venice Biennale?”, Nilbar Güreş spoke not about her artworks or artistic position, but instead about the pandemic period and issues more closely associated with the public agenda of seven years ago. She even explicitly emphasized that participating in the Venice Biennale was not particularly important to her.
“The art system has not been functioning for a long time. Artists are simply trying to make a living trying to earn money and survive under whatever conditions they can. Perhaps because I have become a professional within these conditions, art honestly lost its importance for me a long time ago. The wars of recent years only added fuel to the fire.
As for the Venice Biennale, to me it is a spectacle, and I have never been the kind of professional who truly cared about such spectacles. I have only visited the Venice Biennale twice in my life, and both visits were work-related; otherwise, I probably would never have gone at all, and I am sure I would not have missed anything.
Moreover, behind many of these Venice Biennale participations and national pavilion representations lie forms of injustice and incompetence. We are all aware of the many scandals surrounding the biennial system: artists being forced to raise their own budgets, curators having to secure production funding and artist fees on their own, and countless other issues. These are things that remain largely invisible from the outside, but from within, the system appears deeply unfair and imbalanced.”
An excerpt from an interview with Nilbar Güreş for Gazete Oksijen
These statements give rise to a reading in which an artist representing Türkiye with the support of numerous institutions, sponsors, and cultural structures appears to experience a profound sense of alienation toward the biennial itself, the mechanisms of representation, and the contemporary art system more broadly. At the same time, the remarks have also prompted criticism that the artist approaches Türkiye’s social and cultural questions primarily through a lens of general dissatisfaction and broad, 'surface level' characterizations.
On the other hand, these statements also raise questions regarding possible tensions between the artist and the İKSV administration throughout the process, the material difficulties surrounding the production conditions, or the inequalities she may have experienced from within the biennial system itself.
What remains striking, however, is this: despite neither producing a direct discourse on war in the works exhibited at the biennial nor appearing as a signatory to the campaigns surrounding the protests, the artist nevertheless took part in the demonstrations. As a result, her participation comes to be read less as a natural extension of her artistic practice than as part of the collective political atmosphere and momentum that formed around the biennial itself.
Although she now says that the Venice Biennale is not particularly important to her, Güreş spoke in a 2021 interview with the Turkish newspaper Cumhuriyet about how important such visibility actually is, especially for women artists. She argued that male artists are often given access to major international platforms like the Turkish Pavilion at much younger ages, while women artists tend to receive the same visibility much later in their careers. She also emphasized that women artists need support and visibility now, not when they grow older.
Only four years after that interview, the artist, invited to the biennial at the age of 48, stated in another interview for ArtReview, published in partnership with Versace during the 2026 Venice Biennale, that she no longer feels excitement toward art. When asked, “Who is the most important artist to come out of your country?”, she avoided naming anyone, saying that it would be impossible to give a single name.
Similarly, when asked whether there was something she wished people knew about her country but probably did not, she declined to answer, explaining that, “as someone with a multicultural background,” she did not feel the question corresponded to her own experience. Given the artist’s multilayered identity within the Kurdish diaspora, such statements create the impression that her relationship to the representational framework of the Turkish Pavilion has contained a certain distance from the very beginning, despite having been offered such a prominent platform of representation.
This position may be read as a critical stance toward the very idea of national representation. But within a platform as explicitly structured around representation as the Turkish Pavilion, the deliberate suspension of an expected cultural narrative can also be interpreted as an implicit objection to the representational framework itself.
From this point onward, the issue ceases to concern only the aesthetic production of an artist and instead becomes a question of the nature of her relationship to the cultural field she represents. An artist’s connection to the scene to which they belong is shaped not only through visibility, but also through their ability to embrace the place and cultural environment they inhabit, develop an intellectual responsibility toward it, and position themselves within a collective memory.
Güreş’s statements increasingly create the impression of a relationship to the Turkish contemporary art scene marked by distance, even by the position of an outside observer. The artist appears to have largely severed her emotional, intellectual, and ethical ties to the cultural ecosystem she represents, no longer positioning herself within its collective memory or shared sense of responsibility.