Protests have been held across the Venice Biennale during its first few days. On Wednesday, Russian activist group Pussy Riot and feminist group FEMEN staged a protest outside Russia’s pavilion, forcing it to close temporarily. On the same day, the Art Not Genocide Alliance group (ANGA) protested against the participation of Israel outside the country’s temporary pavilion in the Arsenale. On Friday, at time of writing, more than 15 pavilions partially or temporarily closed as part of a second strike organised by ANGA. This year’s edition of the Biennale has been beset by controversy and logistical problems since early last year. On Monday, the Biennale announced that Iran had withdrawn from the event, while on Wednesday a report from the Italian news agency Adnkronos reported that the Israeli pavilion artist Belu-Simion Fainaru had threatened to sue the Biennale’s awards jury for antisemitism after it said, on 23 April, that it would not consider countries accused of war crimes for prizes. The entire jury resigned a week after it made the announcement; prizes such as the Golden Lion will now be decided by a public vote.
In other troubled biennial news, Kader Attia has been appointed curator of the seventh edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, the Kochi Biennale Foundation has announced. The French-Algerian artist, curator and professor at HfbK-Hamburg is the first international curator of the biennial – which opens in December 2027 – since its launch in 2012. Read Apollo’s review of the sixth edition of Kochi-Muziris Biennial here.
A 1,000-year-old Native American archaeological site in the Sonoran Desert in Arizona has been damaged by construction crews building the United States–Mexico border wall, the Washington Post reports. On 24 April, bulldozers destroyed an 85-metre-long intaglio of a fish in the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge. Speaking to the Art Newspaper, Lorraine Eiler, a Hia-Ced O’odham elder and co-founder of the International Sonoran Desert Alliance, said the destruction was a ‘deliberate act’ and an ‘insult to our ancestors’.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office has announced the return of 657 trafficked antiquities to India. The artefacts, handed over during a ceremony attended by representative of the Consulate General of India in New York, are worth some $14m and were recovered by the D.A’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit and Homeland Security Investigations. Among them is a bronze of the Buddhist deity Avalokiteshvara, which was stolen from the Mahant Ghasidas Memorial Museum in Raipur and smuggled into the United States some time before 1982. A red sandstone figure of a standing Buddha that was brought to New York by Subhash Kapoor, who was convicted in India in 2022 for running a decades long trafficking operation, has also been returned.
The art patron, collector and businesswoman Doris Fisher has died at the age of 94. Born in San Francisco in 1931, Fisher founded The Gap Inc. with husband, Donald Fisher, in 1969. Beginning with prints sourced for their offices in the mid 1970s, the couple amassed one of the largest private collections of modern and contemporary art in the United States. In 2009, the couple partnered with the San Francisco Museum of Art to loan the 1,100 works in their collection – including pieces by Joan Mitchell, Gerhard Richter and Andy Warhol – to the museum for 100 years. A portion of the Fisher collection went on permanent display at the museum after its major expansion in 2016; last month, 250 works from the collection were rehung as part of ‘Reimagined: The Fisher Collection at 10’. In a statement shared on their website, SFMOMA said that Doris Fisher was ‘a transformative supporter of the arts whose impact on our museum is immeasurable’.
Dian Suci is the winner of the latest Max Mara Art Prize for Women. As part of the prize, the multimedia artist will undertake a six-month travelling residency in Italy. The work produced during the residency will be exhibited at the Museum MACAN in Jakarta before travelling to Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia, which will acquire the works. In Australia, Richard Lewer is the winner of the Archibald Prize for portraiture. For his portrait of Iluwanti Ken, an artist and Pitjantjatjara elder, he takes home a prize of AUD $100,000. His work will be exhibited as part of the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman Prizes show at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney.
