With screams, profanities, and plumes of pink smoke, Pussy Riot ensured Russia’s return to the Venice Biennale in May could not be ignored. The dissident art collective transformed outrage into spectacle, staging a defiant protest outside the Kremlin-backed pavilion, their trademark fluorescent balaclavas standing out amid the haze of smoke bombs and the thumping refrain of “DISOBEY”—a track from their latest album, Suka(“bitch”). The action was a furious rebuke of the Biennale’s controversial decision to readmit Russia, just four years after the start of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Pussy Riot’s stunt went viral and was the latest flashpoint in a Biennale marked by unprecedented political angst. The jury had refused to award prizes to countries “whose leaders are currently charged with crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court”—which was also aimed at Israel—and then resigned en masse. Meanwhile the European Union threatened to cut €2 million in funding. Its foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, said that when Russia “bombs museums, destroys churches, and seeks to erase Ukrainian culture, it should not be allowed to exhibit its own.”
Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, the president of the world’s biggest art show, which continues until November, was unmoved. He told a news conference he would not yield to demands for “censorship, closure, and exclusion,” arguing that “the Biennale is not a court; it is a garden of peace.” But many found the sight of guests drinking prosecco and dancing to a DJ mixing techno and Slavic folk hard to stomach when two days earlier, in broad daylight, a Russian airstrike had killed six people in the frontline Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk. The Russian pavilion opened for the first week of previews but not to the public, amid fears it would further inflame tensions.
But is Buttafuoco’s embrace of Moscow a sign of things to come?
While the EU officially maintains a hard line stance and continuously expands sanctions—with the 21st package targeting Russian banks and “shadow fleets”—some companies are chomping at the bit to reopen in Russia.
Shortly after Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded his neighboour, EU exports to unlikely destinations such as Kyrgyzstan surged. German luxury car exports surged increased by more than 5,000 per cent with Porsches, Bentleys, and Mercedes-Benz G-Wagons turning up in Moscow showrooms via Bishkek, making a mockery of Western export controls. It recently emerged that as much as 83 percent of Irish alumina exports went to Russia, helping to feed its war machine.
But with EU governments it’s a different story. Viktor Orbán’s departure from Hungary has bolstered European unity. Amid US President Donald Trump’s unpredictability, European powers are reopening diplomatic channels with Moscow in coordination with Kyiv, to ensure they have a seat at any future negotiations.
An Evacuated Deer
I wandered over to another part of the Giardini della Biennale where the centerpiece of the Ukrainian pavilion floats above visitors’ heads. Zhanna Kadyrova’s Origami Deer hangs on straps from a lorry crane after its epic 3,000-kilometer journey from the Donbas to six European capitals before finally crossing the Venice lagoon. The work was originally designed for a vacant plinth in Pokrovsk, in eastern Ukraine, where a decommissioned Soviet Su-7 fighter-bomber once sat, a reminder of the region’s nuclear past.
So, the main exhibition, Security Guarantees, underscores a bitter irony: Ukraine gave up its nuclear arsenal in the 1990s in exchange for security guarantees from Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Cast in concrete yet resembling folded origami, Kadyrova’s deer is a metaphor for the paper-thin promises of the Budapest Memorandum.
Like its fellow citizens, the deer has become a refugee. As the frontline drew closer, it had to be cut from its base and evacuated. Its journey through Europe and its precarious, suspended state also mirrors the plight of millions of Ukrainians forced to flee their homes and navigate life in unfamiliar surroundings. Footage of the deer next to the Eiffel Tower, in a Berlin nightclub, outside the European Parliament in Brussels, and at other locations is displayed alongside archival material from the 1994 signing ceremony in Budapest.
“With this project, we want to remind the global community that pacifism is a privilege we currently do not have,” said the co-curator Ksenia Malykh, in a pointed rebuke to Western complacency. Looking at all the photographs and videos of the deer on the move I noted the position of his head. He may sway in the wind, but he looks up, sniffing the air around him with an unmistakable sense of defiance and pride.
Speak of Joy
Across the city, the imposing Palazzo Contarini Polignac hosts one of the Biennale’s most arresting showcases of contemporary Ukrainian art. Joy — From Ukraine into the World, presented by Kyiv’s renowned PinchukArtCentre, brings together leading Ukrainian and international artists to explore the concept of joy. It might seem wildly counterintuitive to focus on happiness at a time when Russia’s assaults on Ukraine have drastically intensified. “It is not about escapism,” clarifies Björn Geldhof, the center’s artistic director. “I think we should speak of joy, we should share joy, but if you share joy, you should not forget which world we are living in.”
At its core are testimonies collected by Hlib Stryzhko—a marine, former prisoner of war, and storyteller. They ground the exhibition in the lived realities of the conflict. One of the most poignant moments he recounts is being given a strawberry chocolate bar after he was captured by Russian forces. Stryzhko had several teeth knocked out during his interrogation so the guard who brought the unexpected gift told him to warm the chocolate underneath his legs to make it easier to eat. The memory carries a bittersweet sense of comfort—a fleeting act of kindness amid brutality. “In a city full of pain and fear, this brought me so much joy that I still remember the taste of that ‘Korona’ strawberry chocolate.”
That feeling was echoed in a work titled Refugees by Kadyrova, the artist who made the travelling deer. She collected houseplants from bombed-out buildings across Ukraine and placed them in front of lightboxes of the ruined schoolrooms, libraries, and clinics where she found them. Some had charred or damaged leaves from explosions, but they had survived, some had even thrived, despite everything.
Visitors were offered limited edition freebies in Alevtina Kakhidze’s pop-up tattoo salon based on her drawings. You could choose from a flower growing from rocks in Crimea, the word “joy” written in Ukrainian, or a microscopic animal known as a tardigrade or moss piglet, less than a millimeter long but capable of surviving in the harshest environments on earth and even in outer space. Much as I liked the idea of carrying a small souvenir home in perpetuity, I had plenty more to see, so I moved on.
Infused with Melancholy
Of all the works in this exhibition, the videos resonated with me the most. Open World by the Kyiv-based cinematographers Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk, features a teenager who fled Zaporizhzhia when it came under intense shelling. He uses a computerized dog to return to his home city narrating a live stream from his bedroom in Poland where he now lives.
The black plastic dog trundles through his half-destroyed school, wanders along the waterfront, plays with his cat at home and even chats to his mother all through the optics, voice, and mechanics of a robot. Technology once designed for military tasks such as bomb disposal now serves as a tenuous way of returning to a home that is increasingly out of reach. Again, the joy of connection is infused with melancholy.
On the ground floor, as you enter the exhibition, the duo has created two video installations Dedicated to the Youth of the World II (2019) and III (2023) of club nights in Kyiv, captured before and during the full-scale war. Using similar shots as well as pulsating beats and featuring faces with an uncanny resemblance, the two films initially seem identical. The rave’s atmosphere appears unchanged, despite the unspoken event dividing the two parts. In some ways, joy endures. But a closer look reveals more careworn faces, and only three of the original clubbers could be found when the later segment was filmed.
A more visceral work, Land (2026), is made from the bodycam footage of the crack reconnaissance troops from Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence. You don’t see them, but you hear them panting as they creep and run through enemy controlled territories, acutely aware of the dangers underfoot, among the trees and from the skies.
Oleksiy Sai, who created the work with serving soldier and cinematographer Yury Gruzinov, told me they deliberately erased the crackle of walkie talkies and gunfire to heighten the sound of the men’s heavy breathing amidst the eerily quiet fields and forests. The 17-minute film encompasses different temporalities: Time seems frozen in abandoned houses on the frontline, but from the point of view of a soldier, filled with adrenalin. The clock has accelerated as he stands on a knife edge between life and death.
When I meet the former prisoner of war Stryzhko, wandering around the exhibition, I ask him if he feels the artists have done justice to his testimony and whether the idea of joy rankles after all he has suffered. He studies me warily, his blue eyes narrowing. “I am happy that I survived. You know, I have no right to be miserable when so many of my friends died defending our freedom,” he says. Then his face breaks into a smile. “Look! My body may be full of metal, but my teeth have been replaced—I am a handsome young soldier again!”
On a board nearby, I read the testimony from Alla Senchenko, a sniper who spent nearly nine months in Russian captivity and returned to Ukraine during a prisoner exchange in February 2023. “I didn't get it at first—joy felt suspicious,” she wrote. “But now I’ve accepted it and embraced it with understanding. Feeling joy despite everything is a strength.”
Lucy Ash is IPQ’s On the Ground columnist. She is an award-winning presenter of radio and television documentaries and author of the book The Baton and the Cross about the Russian Orthodox Church.
