This paper argues that the Venice Biennale is a heavily political institution and in many ways implicated in relations of power and world politics. Through the case of the Venice Biennale the paper seeks to analyse both the phenomenon of global art forums and the capability of art to support and challenge existing power relations.
While the Venice Biennale – and the phenomenon of Biennalization – has been analyzed extensively by art historians and sociologists of art, analyses of the Biennale drawing from theories or ideas of IR are largely missing. This paper addresses the caveat and examines the Biennale from an IR perspective.
The focus of the paper is especially on the presence of Russian art at the Venice Biennale. Russia was one of the first countries to build its own pavilion at the biennale in 1914, and has since witnessed the changing regimes from Russian Empire to Putin’s Russia.
I am curious to explore how Russian art, presented abroad, functions as a mechanism of power in world politics. I analyse the capacity of art to either support the existing power relations, or act as an instrument to change or challenge them. I use representations of gender and migration as an entry points to analyze these questions.
National pavilions are a significant element of the Venice Biennale. The Biennale is thus firmly embedded in the Westphalian imaginary and tied to themes such as country branding, cultural diplomacy, and construction of national imaginaries. This resonates with the fact that the Russian state has recently emphasized culture’s political potential on the official level: new principles of Russian cultural policy were announced in 2014, indicating a trend of culture's institutionalisation to serve the state's political objectives.
However, the Biennale is also a platform of political contestation as exemplified, for example, by a mock occupation of the Russian pavilion by Ukrainian artists or the display of artwork challenging the legitimacy of Russian presidential elections at the 2015 Biennale. In addition, the Venice Biennale is complexly embedded in the complex circuits of the art market.
In this regard the institutional dimension of art, and in specific the institution of Venice Biennale, needs a closer look up from the point of view of international relations. The empirical underpinnings of this research analyse Russian art, exhibited at the Venice Biennale, and utilise state-level documents and Russian media texts related to the Venice Biennale and Russian pavilion.
