Inside the moral collapse of the Venice Biennale, where spectacle, sponsorship and political theatre increasingly eclipse the art itself.
26 May 2026
Adilson De Oliveira
There is a strange violence to the contemporary Biennale circuit that nobody wants to name. Not the symbolic variety embalmed beneath symposium jargon or flattened into the anaesthetic grammar of “institutional critique,” but actual violence: exhaustion disguised as prestige. Humiliation masquerading as access. Human beings are processed through architecture, like luggage at an airport. Entire cultures strip-mined into export-ready aesthetics for wealthy audiences performing curiosity between Aperol receptions. The violence of the invitation list. The violence of networking, mistaken for intellectual life. The violence of standing in line for three hours to witness resistance repackaged as a luxury experience for people wearing artisanal linen and pretending discomfort is political engagement.
‘The Merchant of Tote Bags’. Artwork © Adilson De Oliveira
Venice, in this regard, is less an archipelago of exhibitions than a floating tax haven for cultural capital: a medieval merchant empire reanimated as a networking event for the globally overfunded. Superyachts idle beside collapsing stonework like monuments to late-capitalist necrophilia while collectors, trustees and patrons drift through the canals in private water taxis worth more than entire municipal arts budgets across the Global South. Tote bags swing through the city like military decorations. The logo on the bag matters more than the work inside the pavilion. Catalogues nobody will ever read spill from bins across Venice like ideological litter after a failed election. Embossed paperweights. Branded notebooks. Curatorial landfill masquerading as intellectual production. The tote bag has become the contemporary codpiece: a soft luxury prosthetic announcing institutional virility to other exhausted elites. Nobody asks what “have you seen” anymore. The real question is: who validated your presence?
Everyone, naturally, is producing discourse. Endless fucking discourse. Panels about rupture sponsored by luxury conglomerates. Curators denouncing capitalism beside complimentary prosecco fountains like revolutionary accountants at a hedge-fund funeral. Artists speaking reverently about slowness while speed-walking toward collector dinners with the urgency of cocaine traders fleeing customs. Entire careers built upon the performance of moral seriousness while Western validation still hangs around nearly everybody’s neck like a laminated permission slip to exist.
And to be fair, many of the curators, writers and organisers moving through Venice are deeply intelligent, historically rigorous and genuinely committed to difficult work. But the machinery surrounding them has become so bloated, economically overdetermined and performative that sincerity suffocates beneath the tango of visibility. Exhaustion hangs everywhere like humidity trapped inside a billionaire’s sauna. Artists arrive, escorted by handlers, assistants, publicists, and institutional shepherds, negotiating ten-minute fragments of accessibility as though rationing water during wartime. Interviews unfold like shareholder meetings for unstable moral brands. People drift through camera shots, interrupt mid-sentence, answer questions on behalf of artists or hover nearby protecting careers the way bankers protect volatile stock portfolios.
The artist becomes collateral for a machine too obese to remember why it was built.
‘Starching Empire Clean, One Cycle at A Time’. Artwork ©Adilson De Oliveira
Meanwhile, I drift through these rooms like some failed KGB operative working as Art Africa’s audio technician — carrying cables, batteries and microphones while fragments of empire spill carelessly into my ears in Portuguese, French, English, Spanish and exhausted curatorial American twangs. Languages dragged through bloodlines, ports and conquest routes. Except I do not require surveillance infrastructure. Invisibility is already embedded in the hierarchy. Nobody notices the sound technician clipping microphones onto expensive linen jackets. Nobody imagines the person carrying the audio equipment is also silently cataloguing every contradiction leaking from your mouth like sewage from a luxury cruise liner. It is a city of class structure, and that structure is only visible when you are at the bottom looking up.
One notices the class contradictions immediately on the water taxis. Private boats carve effortlessly through the canals carrying collectors, patrons and trustees in cultivated ease while everyone else ferments inside the vaporetto: overheated, overcrowded, economically compressed and faintly nauseous. Venice has always understood the politics of movement — who glides through the city and who moves through it exhausted. Who arrives as guest and who arrives as cargo.
Around the Arsenale, the contradiction sharpens into something almost pornographic. These vast halls once manufactured the military machinery of colonial expansion: galleys for conquest, extraction, trade and slavery. Engines of empire assembled brick by brick beside the water. Yet during the Biennale, the architecture is treated as neutral scenery for curatorial self-congratulation, as though history politely evaporates the moment somebody installs a wall text about “dialogue,” “healing,” or “decoloniality.” But Venice has always understood commerce. The cargo has merely evolved. Where spices, weapons and human bodies once passed through these docks, we now circulate cultural capital, diplomatic branding and trauma aesthetics for institutional consumption. Empire did not disappear. It learned to write grant applications and cry during panel discussions.
The cargo has changed. The two-step has not.
‘The ambient sound of Europe applauding its own Collapse’. Artwork ©Adilson De Oliveira
Even some of the strongest works seemed haunted by this historical echo. John Beadle’s work and subsequent Junkanoo practice in the Bahamas Pavilion — grounded in Afro-Caribbean resistance, improvisation, and survival — carried an almost unbearable tension within Venice’s machinery of luxury spectacle. Nearby canals, once responsible for imperial circulation, reflected champagne receptions celebrating diasporic discourse while plastic cups and half-eaten appetisers drifted toward the water like the afterbirth of liberal guilt.
I increasingly found myself believing that the Biennale’s most vital works existed not inside the Arsenale proper, but around its edges — haunting its thresholds like unresolved ghosts of history refusing institutional containment. The strongest gestures seemed to emerge precisely where artists were willing to rupture the mythology of the site itself rather than decorate it. Nick Cave’s monumental bronzes, particularly Amalgam (Meditation) and the towering ritualistic figures surrounding it, loomed with an almost funerary grandeur, less like objects than ancient warning systems dragged into the present tense. But it was Alice Maher’s‘ Les Filles d’Ouranos’ that lingered most violently in the mind: those severed orange heads surfacing from the dark waters of the Venetian dock like drowned prophets returning to indict the empire that built itself through those very naval routes. Their placement felt like one of the only genuinely honest gestures in the entire exhibition — a work willing to say: what the fuck does it mean to stage contemporary art inside the engine room of maritime conquest without disturbing its foundations? While so much of the Biennale embalmed history beneath layers of curatorial deodorant, Maher allowed the Arsenale itself to become contaminated by memory again.
The Biennale was never innocent. Its founding purpose was tourism, with the promise of enlightenment: nations displaying themselves like luxury storefronts, competing for prestige, investment, and proximity to European legitimacy. A world fair for empire dressed in curatorial prose. Europe effectively engineered an annual pilgrimage where wealthy audiences consume moral seriousness between collector dinners and sponsored prosecco. Empire curated as leisure. Colonialism with tote bags.
And perhaps that function never disappeared. It simply became more articulate about disguising itself in plain sight. And speaking of dialogue, not every conversation was cynical. Some artists and curators I interviewed carried genuine vulnerability into impossible spaces. Some interviews were searching, generous and deeply human. The strongest artists did not ask to be admired. They confronted you instead — with history, with flesh, with exhaustion, with joy sharpened by survival. They understood something most of the Biennale had forgotten entirely: that art is not a mirror for institutions to admire themselves in, but a blade capable of cutting through the performance of civility itself.
‘The Merchant of Mar-a-Lago’. Artwork © Adilson De Oliveira
Back home in South Africa — and across much of the continent and diaspora — we need to understand something clearly: how little we actually require this event. The Venice Biennale survives partly on convincing the Global South that legitimacy still arrives through European architecture. But the arithmetic is absurd. Venice is exorbitantly expensive, physically punishing and spiritually hollow. One walks kilometres each day with blistered feet, only to arrive at another queue leading to another room, where someone informs you that your QR code and identification do not match, despite an online registration process that requires more bureaucracy than certain visa applications.
And all of it unfolds beneath the gaze of real wealth.
Not aspirational wealth. Not “creative industry” wealth. Dynastic wealth. Plantation wealth. Oil wealth. Weapons-contract wealth. The sort of wealth that pays 300 euros for a few plates of decorative pasta assembled by a man battling with what tourism has done to his city. Globalisation, we were told, would democratise culture. But for whom? Certainly not the global majority navigating a city where even coffee becomes an economic negotiation. Venice quickly teaches you that sitting down while drinking espresso is considered a luxury. Stand at the counter and swallow your forty millilitres like medicine, or risk paying extra for the privilege of somebody wiping a table with a dirty rag and an expression that quietly communicates: tourists go home. Especially if you possess the particular racial geometry allowing Europe to mistake your holiday for migration.
There is also something profoundly grotesque in the contemporary obsession with healing, trauma aesthetics and the endless export market of suffering. Trauma porn has become its own luxury commodity — pain translated into wall text, grief converted into grant applications, violence flattened into digestible visual language for biennale audiences with excellent healthcare and expensive footwear. Entire exhibitions now function like ethical safari tourism for wealthy Europeans wanting to feel politically awake before returning to five-star hotels and fucking each other beneath soft artisanal lighting.
Monumental installations aestheticising collapse. Institutional solidarity statements carry the emotional depth of airport advertising campaigns. Entire curatorial frameworks are built around the performance of compassion, while the machinery beneath remains structurally identical to the systems it supposedly critiques. The liberal empire has discovered the perfect camouflage: self-awareness without consequence. Guilt as a service.
‘Colonial Bart and the Two-State Art Solution’. Artwork © Adilson De Oliveira
And yes — before somebody proposes a symposium on my moral failings — I am unapologetically pro-Palestinian. Entirely. South Africa understands Apartheid perhaps better than most nations on earth. We recognise the architecture when we see it: checkpoints, permits, segregated mobility, the bureaucratic engineering of humiliation, the slow pedagogy of dehumanisation, teaching one group that their movement matters more than another group’s survival.
But here the contradiction becomes unavoidable.
South Africa is not some sacred moral authority floating above hypocrisy. Even while our government stood before the International Court of Justice invoking genocide and international law, South African coal continued helping power Israeli infrastructure. We prosecute moral outrage in The Hague while materially feeding the machinery we condemn. The courtroom and the cargo shipment exist simultaneously. Morality outsourced to press conferences while the invoices continue clearing in the background.
That contradiction matters because political struggle has never been clean. My father narrowly escaped death during Apartheid because he skipped his usual stop for cigarettes before boarding a bus out of his whites-only neighbourhood. Minutes separated existence from erasure. The café was bombed by Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the ANC, formed in response to the escalating violence and suffocation of the Apartheid state. Had my father’s nicotine withdrawals allowed, I would not exist.
That reality permanently contaminates my understanding of liberation. Apartheid was a machine capable of rearranging entire bloodlines through timing, bureaucracy, violence and chance. And still — understanding that — I remain at peace with the fact that liberation movements are never morally symmetrical. They emerge from conditions already poisoned by brutality. Nobody fully understands Apartheid because violence at that scale eventually exceeds language itself. Systems of domination become too bureaucratically intimate, too horrifyingly ordinary, too infrastructural to explain cleanly. Which is precisely why Palestine resonates here with such unbearable familiarity.
And the Biennale’s response fully exposed its moral architecture.
‘L’Italia Finalmente Ha La Sua Biennale’. Artwork © Adilson De Oliveira
The anti-Israel, anti-genocide, anti-war demonstrations at Venice were, in many respects, the most successful interventions of the Biennale itself. Protesters achieved something the exhibition rarely manages anymore: visibility with consequence. Posters, marches, flyers and interventions transformed the city into an actual site of political friction rather than carefully managed aesthetic discomfort designed not to upset donors too aggressively. When demonstrators approached the Arsenale and police batons began striking bodies beneath shields and helmets, the performance barrier collapsed entirely. For one brief moment, the Biennale stopped being metaphorical. Politics became physical again. Suddenly, everybody remembered that violence is not an essay topic but a gash to the head.
And watching artists and curators suddenly pivot toward loudly public pro-Palestinian positions after years of strategic silence often felt grotesque — especially when those positions became institutionally profitable only after activists, students and grassroots organisations had already endured decades of censorship, intimidation, professional risk, and death. Too many artists arrived late to the funeral, wearing revolutionary outfits stitched together by others’ hard work.
More uncomfortable still is how many of these careers were materially constructed through networks deeply entangled with Zionist patronage structures to begin with: collectors, trustees, galleries, donors and funding ecosystems that elevated these artists long before public opinion became safer terrain. The art world possesses an extraordinary ability to metabolise contradiction without ever slowing down. Yesterday’s sponsor quietly becomes today’s moral inconvenience. Entire careers built within systems of capital suddenly reposition themselves as radical conscience once the institutional winds shift. One begins wondering whether some artists are truly risking anything at all, or simply rebranding quickly enough to remain market-compatible with the latest moral consensus.
And beneath all of this remains the contradiction nobody wants to answer honestly: if cultural boycotts achieve nothing, why did the closure of the Russian Pavilion matter so profoundly? Venice revealed something deeply ugly about liberal neutrality. Neutrality is rarely neutral. It is simply the management of which violence is considered inconvenient to capital. Which corpses interrupt the sponsorship cycle? Which deaths become administratively embarrassing?
‘Art Not Genocide Alliance versus The Police State’. Artwork © Adilson De Oliveira
Does the EU only pull funding when white bodies are in the morgue?
Israeli officials speak of “contamination” in the art world as though the crisis were aesthetic rather than structural. But the contamination is not external. The pavilion is not the contamination, the state sustaining it is.
And then, inevitably, we arrive at the litigious Belu-Simion Fainaru’s Rose of Nothingness — a title borrowed from Paul Celan’s 1961 poem Psalm with all the subtlety of someone stealing flowers from a grave and presenting them as original decoration. It centres on a shallow pool of “black milk” — ink-dark liquid dripping steadily from above, each ripple carrying the weight of historical trauma so routinely weaponised by the Israeli state whenever dissent grows too loud outside its walls. The work understands how the Holocaust, while undeniably catastrophic in its horror, has also been transformed into a reflexive shield of moral insulation: invoked whenever protest threatens to puncture the state’s self-image, as though outrage itself becomes antisemitic the moment it refuses silence. Promising absence, void and transcendence while the world overflows with testimony, images and corpses. But here, “nothingness” reads differently. It reads as evasion. As aesthetic distance is mistaken for profundity. The work collapses beneath the weight of its own abstraction. It gestures toward philosophy while refusing material reality. It offers poetic contemplation that requires proximity. An exercise in political zero-gravitas.
Standing before it, you realise the gesture it demands — silence, contemplation, reverence — is precisely what it has not earned. The urge becomes more utilitarian, almost physiological: like stepping up to a urinal after twelve Birra Moretti’s. Not transcendence, but release. In fact, one begins suspecting that to piss directly into its carefully staged void would not violate the work, but complete it. A final honest gesture inside a space otherwise evacuated of consequence. And if that feels too offensive, perhaps we should simply have a jet ski circle it, to punctuate the pathetic attempt at not-so-soft power that it is.
‘Jet-Ski’s at a funeral’. Artwork © Adilson De Oliveira
And yet, despite everything, a handful of artists still managed to cut through the noise. Roberto Diago’s ‘Hombres Libres‘, at the Cuban Pavilion, restored something close to faith — not because it screamed louder than the machinery surrounding it, but because it cut through the Biennale’s narcotic haze with almost humiliating clarity. The encounter felt less like viewing an artwork than surviving a confession. The work carried warmth, collaboration and historical weight without collapsing into spectacle. Monolithic yet collaborative, the work felt less authored than collectively exhaled — bursting with the pressure, contradictions, and shared pulse of a community. Elsewhere, the Ecuador Pavilion’s ‘Tawna & Oscar’, the Egypt Pavilion’s ‘The Pavilion of Silence: Between the Seen and the Unseen’, Saudi Arabia’s ‘May Your Tears Never Dry, You Who Weep Over Stones’, and the U.A.E. Pavilion’s ‘Washwasha’ offered rare moments of silence, political nuance and emotional restraint in a Biennale otherwise addicted to overproduction and diplomatic theatre. I left several of them choked up, carrying that strange pressure in the throat that arrives when art bypasses language completely. They reminded me that art can still rearrange something inside the body when it stops performing for empire. I will write about these exhibitions in due time because I owe their brilliance the seriousness, patience and reverence they so profoundly deserve. They deserve to breathe outside the suffocating machinery surrounding them.
But something in me collapsed after the strikes and reversals on May 8. Not simply because pavilions reopened under institutional pressure, diplomatic anxiety and threats from back home — but because the spell finally broke completely. Whatever fragile belief I still carried in the Biennale as a meaningful cultural space died that day. After that, it became increasingly difficult to care about the work in the same way. The architecture around it had exposed itself too clearly. Solidarity existed only within acceptable operating conditions. Dissent remained permissible only until funding, ministers, trustees, sponsors or national branding became uncomfortable.
This was my first Venice Biennale.
It will very likely be my last.
‘Tourists Go Home — The Colonisers Already Booked the Airbnb’. Artwork © Adilson De Oliveira
Not because remarkable work did not exist — it absolutely did — but because the contradiction between the rhetoric of care and the machinery sustaining the event became psychologically unbearable. By the end of the Biennale, I became deeply suicidal in a way I struggle to articulate cleanly. Not theatrically. Not romantically. Just hollowed out by the spectacle of watching human suffering endlessly aestheticised, sponsored, moderated and consumed while everybody continued networking beneath it as though history itself were another VIP activation with complimentary drinks.
Once you see the mechanism clearly, the city’s emotional temperature changes permanently.
The openings become funerals masquerading as celebrations.
The beer tastes sour.
The vaporetto becomes a floating coffin transporting exhausted vampires between rehearsals of moral performance.
And perhaps that is the final trick of liberal empire: not censorship, but ambiguity. The ability to aestheticise every contradiction until morality itself dissolves into atmosphere. Violence becomes discourse. Genocide becomes programming. Political clarity evaporates into “complexity,” moderated panels and architecturally beautiful evasions. Even the insistence that art should simply “speak for itself” (I’m looking at you Alma Allen) begins to resemble plausible deniability performed through aesthetics.
‘The Quality of Mas Is Not Strain’d’. Artwork © Adilson De Oliveira
Returning home afterwards, one realises how provincial our own ecosystems have become, too — poisoned by weak leadership, patronage networks, secondary-market fantasies and cultural cowardice. Venice is a joke. A one-liner delivered to an empty room while everybody applauds because the underpaid technician carried in the microphone.
Maybe the answer is not reform, but decentring. Paying closer attention to events like the Sharjah Biennial, Gwangju Biennale, The Havana Biennial (wishfully, someday), Recontres de Bamako, Dak’ Art: African Contemporary Art Biennale or the São Paulo Biennial — spaces that, despite their own contradictions, are driven by discourse rather than sponsorship pathology. Venice no longer feels like the ‘centre’. It feels like the place is desperately insisting it still is. Perhaps the most radical gesture left is not participation, but redistribution of attention. To look elsewhere before those spaces, too, are flattened into luxury trade fairs draped in curatorial language.
Working alongside ART AFRICA throughout this Biennale only sharpened another realisation: how catastrophically weak criticism has become across much of the art world. Serious criticism has increasingly been replaced by lifestyle journalism for exhausted elites and faux academics, insinuating they read. Press releases masquerade as essays, even though they are drenched in ChatGPT’s bile.
We desperately need rigorous criticism again. Constructive hostility. Writing capable of loving art enough to wound the institutions shackling it.
As Narcissus collapsed beside his own reflection, the Venice Biennale has disappeared into a final act of cultural auto-asphyxiation — a civilisation so busy polishing its self-image it failed to notice the water rising around its throat.
Adilson De Oliveira joins the ART AFRICA team as a guest writer while taking up a long-term fellowship with the ART AFRICA Foundation. Working closely with Suzette and Brendon Bell-Roberts, his focus is on developing new outlets for critical art writing and helping develop young voices within ART AFRICA’s Programme.
Adilson De Oliveira is a Johannesburg-born multidisciplinary artist, animator, and cultural practitioner whose work explores history, memory, and Luso-African identity through satire, technology, and decolonial critique. A Fine Arts graduate from the University of the Witwatersrand, he began as a printmaker before shifting toward a practice that treats machines as creative collaborators. Since co-founding The Magolide Collective in 2019, De Oliveira has used media including drawing, video, XR, and AI to challenge the Western art canon and blur boundaries between truth and fiction. His work serves as both a resistance and an archive, capturing the complex realities of postcolonial South Africa.
