Ukraine at the Venice Biennale: Ukraine as a Cultural Concept

A young Ukrainian refugee carefully reproduces the sounds of the weapons which attacked his homeland. Photo by Steven Beijer.

By RACHEL BENHAM June 20, 2024

In the Giardini, in Venice, Poland, the good neighbor, is showing work from Ukrainian artists in its pavilion. The space has the appearance of an auditorium and the dark audience seating area is placed opposite a large screen. In front of the screen there are microphones, designed, we assume, to pick up sounds from the audience. We meet, through this screen, various Ukrainians, refugee in Poland. They sit outside and it looks cold. It looks bleakly lonely out there, too. 

A young man sits in front of the camera, his features still lush with childhood. With his lips, his tongue, his teeth, he makes a sound like metal, the sound of a weapon. He makes the sound again. His cheeks bulge with his sincerity, his faithfulness to the sound. 

The young man ardently produces the sound again, and then, he asks us to mimic him. 

Outside, Venice is glorious in the sunshine; the Biennale feels like a festival. But trapped within the black walls of the Polish Pavilion, this imposition is too great, too unexpected, to be readily entered into. The loose collection of individuals who find themselves thrown together only by circumstance stay silent, and merely witness the imitated sounds of war rained down upon Ukraine. 

Left wordless in the middle of the exhibition, one feels incredulous at one’s first assumption, betrayed by the naive initial belief that the installation only hopes to make us consider what it feels like to know what it sounds like, to live in the country top of Putin’s shopping list, a space emptied out, evacuated, decimated. The singular focus of the auditory seems as if it will blessedly bypass the compassion fatigue of the viewer, asking us to do none of the heavy lifting of processing direct emotion or expression of suffering. Until it isn’t, the only demand placed upon us is that we must witness a sound. 

Directed at the audience, several microphones are positioned to pick up the intended response. Photo by Steven Beijer.
 

But despite having asked so little of its viewer previously, the installation’s instruction to repeat, to participate in the maintenance of knowledge acquired through Being a Ukrainian, is, for some reason, not something that is accomplished. In the silence, one wonders how powerful the effect must be, with voices held in unison. The spaces we do not fill give us time to reflect.

*****

Without identity, there can be no individual, and without the individual, there is no crime to commit in any direction. Currently, Ukraine’s biggest cultural export is that they have been invaded by Russia, and there is little of theirs otherwise that we have a taste for. Not only short of weapons and troops, Ukraine is dangerously short on cultural currency and capital.

In Poland’s Pavilion, the young man’s command asks, through its request for our participation, us to put ourselves in his position, but at the Biennale, we cannot. There is a step which must be taken in order to be able to know what it feels like, and it is the step that leads to empathy. Both at the Biennale and enduringly, politically and culturally, the shoes of the Ukrainian are not, however desperately they might be extended, something we in the global north, the lands of NATO, the states of the EU, are confident stepping into.  

The exhibitors’ choice to strip back experience to reveal the pornography of the killing sounds produced by Russia works to make the point that the people of Ukraine have had knowledge forced upon them, an innocence torn away, a burden of data placed upon them which they should not have to carry alone. Subsequently, the exposure of our unwillingness to add our voices to theirs skillfully reveals our collective cowardice, but there is nothing here that brings us closer to the Ukrainian as actor, as individual. There is nothing here that readily builds to the notion of the Ukrainian, and in a world in which we worship the rapidity and accessibility of sensation, this is a problem. 

The installation commands the audience to repeat the performed sounds, echoing the noises of artillery. Photo by Steven Beijer.
 

As it stands, Volodymyr Zelensky’s black sweaters are probably one of the most reliable referents of the visual representation of Ukraine within the media. Flanked by statesmen in suits, Zelynsky’s plain, practical clothes stand out, they admonish, we do not have the luxury, and they make him seem like the most serious person in the room. Zelynsky’s skillful branding makes him instantly identifiable, and that is important, because Zelynsky’s work begins and ends with the assertion of the existence of the Ukrainian state, for only then can this existence be defended. 

One could speculate that what Zelynsky clearly knows so well is not known, so well, in the Polish Pavilion. But perhaps it is simply that it is not enough. The 2024 entry to the Venice Biennale cannot be sufficiently large enough to also contain the multidimensional characteristics of the Ukrainian people, and yet, it must. When given a choice between exposing our silence and communicating the specifics of their existence, the exhibitors choose to hold us to account, as they should, but this takes us no closer to a recognition of or responsibility to the Ukrainian Other. 

Events like the Biennale, like Eurovision, however few artistic boundaries they push, are important because they give contested nations the opportunity to say, here I am! They work as a greeting, a platform in a space saturated with dominant voices. But what Ukraine needs is a bigger platform, a larger space, a megaphone through which to stream great art and lines from poems and recipes for cakes we did not know we wanted to eat. Given such a narrow opportunity to speak, from Ukraine we can hear only about war, and until we hear something else, we will not know what we are meant to be defending. WM