With scarcely a week before the world’s premier contemporary art exhibition opens to the public, the entire international jury of the Venice Biennale has stepped down, plunging the event into institutional crisis. The five-member panel, chaired by Brazilian curator Solange Farkas, informed the Biennale foundation of its collective resignation on Wednesday, a decision made public the following day. The brief official statement offered no direct explanation, but the move came just days after the same jury declared it would withhold prizes from any country whose leaders face International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrants for crimes against humanity — a category that, at this edition, applies solely to Russia and Israel.

That declaration, articulated on 22 April, was itself a response to a decision taken weeks earlier by Biennale president Pietrangelo Buttafuoco to readmit Russia into the national pavilions for the first time since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Viewed from Brussels, the reversal ignited immediate protest. The European Commission, which had consistently argued that permitting Russian state representation constitutes a breach of the bloc’s sanctions logic, froze two million euros in funding. In Kyiv, officials and cultural figures accused the Biennale of laundering Moscow’s soft-power ambitions at a moment when its military continues to pummel Ukrainian cities. The Russian pavilion project, titled ‘The Tree Takes Root in the Sky’, will feature some forty musicians, artists, philosophers, and poets drawn from Russia, as well as from Argentina, Brazil, Mali, and Mexico, framing itself as a transnational cultural dialogue.

The domestic political reaction in Rome has been equally fraught. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni publicly distanced her government from the decision, stating it was ‘not shared by the government’, while acknowledging the Biennale’s statutory autonomy. Culture Minister Alessandro Giuli dispatched inspectors to the foundation, though the ministry insisted it had no intention of placing the president under commissarial control. In a twist that reveals the cross-cutting nature of the dispute, veteran centre-left commentator Ezio Mauro defended Buttafuoco against nationalist critics, arguing that culture cannot be reduced to an instrument of government foreign policy. Yet the fallout widened further when an Israeli sculptor, Belu-Simion Fainaru, accused the jury of racial discrimination over its exclusion of Israel from prize contention, threatening legal action.

The immediate institutional consequences are severe. The Biennale has announced that the Golden and Silver Lions for national participation — previously awarded on the jury’s expert recommendation — will now be decided by public vote, a mechanism that curatorial professionals in London and Berlin regard as a populist dodge that diminishes the prize’s artistic credibility. The awards ceremony, traditionally held on the vernissage, has been pushed back to 22 November, the exhibition’s closing day, effectively decoupling the ritual from the opening’s media momentum. Analysts in European cultural capitals now question whether the Biennale can maintain its historic role as a neutral platform when geopolitical fault lines run directly through its pavilions.

Looking ahead, the rupture signals a broader realignment in the governance of global art gatherings. The crisis has laid bare the impossibility of insulating a state-backed institution from the moral imperatives of international law, especially when the ICC’s docket coincides with active armed conflict. The resigning jurors, in their original 22 April pledge, styled themselves as defenders of human rights, yet their exit leaves the field to a procedural vacuum in which the public, rather than specialists, will adjudicate on entries presented by states that artists themselves may boycott. The edifice of the Biennale is likely to stand, but the idea that it can remain a protected sphere above politics now seems irretrievably shattered.