On April 30, 2026, all five members of the international jury for《In Minor Keys》, the 61st International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, resigned just nine days before the exhibition’s opening.
 
Led by jury president Solange Oliveira Farkas, the jury members Zoe Butt, Elvira Dyangani Ose, Marta Kuzma, and Giovanna Zapperi released a brief statement of resignation through e-flux.

Solange Oliveira Farkas is the founding director of VideoBrasil and has long worked on curatorial practices related to Latin American and Global South media culture and non-mainstream art discourse. Zoe Butt is a curator known for introducing contemporary art from Vietnam and Southeast Asia to the international art world.
 
Elvira Dyangani Ose, originally from Equatorial Guinea, has focused on public art and postcolonial discourse. Marta Kuzma has engaged extensively with critical art discourse surrounding Eastern Europe and the post-Soviet region, while Giovanna Zapperi is an art historian specializing in feminist art history and contemporary art theory.
 
At the center of the controversy was the participation of the Russian and Israeli national pavilions. In a previously released〈Statement of Intention〉, the jury announced that national pavilions representing countries whose leaders had been indicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) would be excluded from consideration for the Golden Lion and Silver Lion awards. The statement was widely interpreted as targeting Russia and Israel, immediately triggering strong backlash.
 
Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs condemned the decision as the politicization of art and anti-Israeli political propaganda. Italian Minister of Culture Alessandro Giuli declared a boycott of the Biennale preview and opening ceremony, while the European Union decided to withdraw approximately €2 million in funding previously allocated for the 2028 Venice Biennale due to issues surrounding Russian participation.
 
Ultimately, the jury resigned, and the Venice Biennale Foundation announced that the existing Golden Lion award structure would be abolished and replaced with a visitor-voted “Visitors’ Lions” system, with the awards ceremony postponed to the closing day on November 22.

Between Artistic Autonomy and Political Responsibility
 
For decades, the international art world has regarded artistic autonomy and freedom of expression as core principles. Museums and biennials functioned as public spaces that maintained a degree of distance from political reality while also providing a framework for critical reflection on that reality.
 
Today, however, that boundary has become far more complex. War, human rights issues, state violence, and platform politics now circulate in real time. The participation of national pavilions, sponsorship structures, artists’ statements, and even institutional silence have all become subjects of public debate.
 
Contemporary art no longer remains in a position of observing reality from the outside. Political conflict, market systems, technological change, and questions of identity now operate not only as themes within artworks, but also as conditions shaping how exhibitions are organized and interpreted.

Many international exhibitions today address issues such as gender, colonialism, environment, refugees, and war. In this context, not only the formal and sensory qualities of artworks, but also the positions taken by artists and institutions, have become important elements of interpretation.
 
Platform environments accelerate these changes even further. Works are circulated online before they are slowly experienced within exhibition spaces, and exhibitions themselves are increasingly consumed as shareable visual moments.
 
As a result, artistic autonomy and political responsibility are no longer separable within today’s international art world. What matters now is how art constructs its relationship with reality through form, perception, and institutional language.

Questions Facing Korean Contemporary Art
 
The mass resignation of the Venice Biennale jury shows that the international art world can no longer operate according to the structures of the past. War and human rights, national pavilions and institutions, artistic autonomy and political responsibility are no longer separate issues. Contemporary art has already entered the eye of the storm.
 
This shift also raises important questions for Korean contemporary art.
 
Until now, the Korean art world has invested significant energy in entering the global system through participation in international art fairs and biennials, growing interest from overseas galleries and institutions, and the expanding international visibility of younger artists.
 
What matters now, however, is no longer participation itself, but how Korean contemporary art interprets a global art world whose structures are becoming increasingly unstable.
 
The Korean art scene is also being absorbed into a system driven by speed and visibility. Works are exposed to the market before sufficient accumulation and development, exhibitions circulate primarily through image consumption, and critical discourse weakens amid SNS-driven reactions and market visibility.
 
For this reason, Korean contemporary art cannot remain at the level of merely following international trends. Korea’s compressed modernization, divided national reality, hyper-urbanization, platform culture, extreme competition, social isolation, and changing digital sensibilities collectively represent an intensely condensed version of the instability and structural conflicts shaping the world today.
 
Korean contemporary art cannot avoid this storm. What matters is not being swept away by it. Rather than repeating the language of the global art world, it must reinterpret the realities Korean society is passing through with its own sensibility and structure. That interpretation must evolve into a new set of standards operating across artworks, exhibitions, criticism, institutions, markets, and platforms.

References

• Associated Press (AP) – “The Venice Biennale previews in chaos as war follows art into the world's oldest exhibition”
• The Guardian – “Venice Biennale jury quits amid row over participation of Russia”
• Reuters – “Venice Biennale thrown into fresh turmoil as art jury resigns”
• e-flux – “Statement of Resignation”
• La Biennale di Venezia – “The resignations of the International Jury of the Biennale Arte 2026”