by MARIIA NYAAS (CODE)
For more than a century, the Venice Biennale has been one of the world’s most elegant machines for producing legitimacy. Nations present themselves. Artists represent cultures. Curators construct narratives. Juries assign value. Institutions transform participation into recognition. The machinery is familiar. The Biennale’s national pavilion system was built on an old diplomatic fiction: that artists can represent nations without becoming identical to states. In peaceful times, that fiction is useful. In wartime, it becomes unstable. Can a national pavilion remain purely cultural during war? Can representation remain symbolic when the state itself is accused of violence? Can art be separated from power when legitimacy is precisely what is being contested?
This year, the machinery appears to be failing. The 61st Venice Biennale, conceived by Koyo Kouoh under the title “In Minor Keys,” begins with a silence that no exhibition can fully absorb. Kouoh never…