I was texting a museum director friend in Asia recently. We were discussing whether a trip to this year’s “artworld Olympics”, the Venice Biennale, justified the carbon release.

I felt ambivalent. The main exhibition is curated by Koyo Kouoh, whose 2016 edition of Ireland’s Biennale, EVA International, on the 1916 Easter Rising centennial I had admired. Kouoh died of cancer earlier this year. Her posthumously realised Venice Biennale, titled In Minor Keys, seemed a final opportunity to appreciate the subtle, intelligent work of Africa’s leading curator.

Against the lure of Kouoh’s exhibition, though, was a queasy realisation that the Biennale seemed to be ideologically backsliding. Russia and Israel, both accused of war crimes, were controversially participating.

Alongside the huge guest-curated show of contemporary art, the Biennale invites countries to present exhibitions they curate themselves in national pavilions in the Giardini di Biennale and citywide venues. Following Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia was excluded, its pavilion remaining shuttered throughout the 59th and 60th editions. But last year Giorgia Meloni’s government appointed rightwing ideologue Pietro Buttafuoco as Biennale director.

Buttafuoco revoked Russia’s exclusion. He also facilitated the relocation of Israel’s exhibition from its usual Giardini pavilion to a high security cul-de-sac in the Biennale’s second official venue, the massive Arsenale.

“This biennale seems cursed,” texted my friend. Despite feeling hypocritical about the environmental burden, I booked a flight to Venice.

Angry protests and violent reprisals

In the weeks leading up to the exhibition, my friend’s suggestion looked increasingly on point. A complicated choreography of war, state violence and activism began to play out. They culminated during the Bienniale preview in angry protests and violent reprisals.

The Art Not Genocide Alliance (ANGA) gathered 236 curators, artists and art workers to campaign for Israel’s exclusion and improved conditions for cultural workers.

When Kouoh’s international jury refused to consider Israel and Russia for the Biennale’s prestigious Golden Lion awards, artist Belu-Simion Fainaru, who was representing Israel, threatened them with legal action, according to the Italian news agency Adnkronos and arts publication Hyperallergic. The jury resigned. Their subsequent silence has not been explained.

Relieved of the professional all-female expert jury that Kuouh appointed, Buttafuoco instated a Eurovision-style audience prize. At the time of writing, over 70 artists have withdrawn from the awards in protest.

Like an artwork, a curse is a performative utterance at the nexus of ritual symbolism and magic. People like to believe that art, unlike curses, is a force for good. But as I argue in my book The Deployment of Art, there is a long history of state co-option of art and artists in the service of malign agendas of state violence. To me, The 61st Biennale seems one such example.

In a statement on the Biennale website, Buttafuoco amplifies the spiritual dimensions of Kouoh’s vision. “It is an exhibition permeated with spirit, with a sacredness that puts the person, the human being, back at the heart of things … looking to the sky once more.”

Much art in the main exhibition is hard to square with such whimsy. Pio Abad’s precise critical drawings of everyday objects of imperial plunder, like houseplants and chocolate, alongside stolen Benin bronzes. Walid Raad’s series of found photographs of beds slept in by Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat. Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s extraordinary sculptural excavation of the lost ancient city of Orthosia, hidden beneath a buried refugee camp in southern Lebanon.

But other works better serve Buttafuoco’s vague, obfuscating narratives of “sacredness” and “spirituality”.

In the Arsenale, an uprooted olive tree that recalls images of the desecration of Palestinian olive groves rotates on a plinth to the perverse accompaniment of tinkly ballerina music. This work by Theo Eshetu is titled Garden of the Broken Hearted, but the accompanying label doesn’t explain why the tree was uprooted, or from where, only that it “stands as a poetic reflection of impermanence”.

Alfredo Jaar’s “shrine” to base materials, a thrumming scarlet cathedral titled The End of the World meanwhile, so overwhelms the senses that I felt faint. I later saw a young woman collapsed outside it, attended by paramedics. Numerous other works draw on ritual traditions and spiritual practices from “the powerhouse of Africa” (Buttofuocco’s term).

Police presence was pervasive throughout the previews. Armed, helmeted officers held a line around Pussy Riot’s demonstration at the Russian pavilion, where protesters released blue, yellow and pink smoke canisters chanting “bloody Russian art” and “curated by Putin, corpses included”.

On the final preview day, as many pavilions closed early in strike protest, police stomped through the Giardini in heavily armed groups ten or 20 strong. At 4.30pm a peaceful crowd of ANGA protesters, many with young children in pushchairs or carried on shoulders, marched from the Giardini to the Arsenale where riot police used batons to beat them back. Surveillance helicopters hovered over the city until long after midnight.

Visions of hell

When future art historians study the 61st Biennale, they may notice a poster slogan from the ANGA protest: “Palestine is the Future of the World.” Meanwhile, visitors would do well to venture beyond the Giardini and Arsenale to an unofficial collateral exhibition organised by the Museo Moderno Buenos Aires.

Taking its title from John Milton’s description of hell, Darkness Visible: The Long Shadow of the Dictatorship brings together a trans-generational group of artists. Their work has been shaped by a regime of state terror (1976-83) that implemented a systemic policy of kidnappings, torture, murder and the forced disappearance of thousands.

Darkness Visible positions art as a vehicle for understanding history, protecting memory and human rights, and engaging in activism against state violence. One photograph by Marcelo Brodsky documents a demonstration by the Madres de Plaza de Mayo demanding information about their forcibly disappeared children. Brodsky’s mother (whose son was disappeared) appears in the image holding a banner that draws connections between second world war concentration camps in Warsaw and ESMA, a clandestine torture and extermination centre used by the Argentinian junta during the dictatorship.

As I contemplated this image, the exhibition’s curator Victoria Noorthoorn explained: “We wanted to present this show in Venice now because our Argentinian artists have much to say about fear, violence, pain and trauma that remain as scars from Argentina’s repressive regime. Their work reminds us of the need to protect core values: human and civic rights, democracy, freedom of expression and artistic creation.”

The protests I witnessed in Venice were marked by real anger, solidarity but also moments of tenderness and joy. A hopeful sign of how art and artists might imaginatively reinvent future biennales, undo the cursed present and lead us away from the darkness closing in.

Clare Carolin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

The effective collapse of the Future Combat Air System (FCAS) fighter jet programme is a major setback for European defence cooperation.

France, Germany and Spain have spent nearly a decade trying to develop what was intended to become Europe’s premier next-generation combat aircraft, only for the programme to succumb to disputes over leadership, the distribution of work and intellectual property.

Yet Europeans shouldn’t be surprised. The history of European combat aviation is littered with programmes that struggled under the weight of competing national ambitions. In this respect, FCAS looks less like an extraordinary failure than the latest chapter in a recurring story.

The more important question is not why FCAS has run into trouble, but rather what its collapse reveals about Europe’s ability to generate and sustain the military capabilities it will need in a more dangerous world.

Adversaries are now investing heavily in integrated and layered air defences encompassing long-range missiles, electronic warfare capabilities and increasingly sophisticated sensors. Maintaining the ability to penetrate defended airspace in future conflicts will require a step change in capability.

FCAS was conceived as a “sixth-generation” combat system – the latest leap in fighter jet technology – to overcome this contested air environment. At its centre would sit a new combat aircraft, supported by autonomous drones, advanced sensors, electronic warfare systems and a digital network linking everything together from the 2040s.

The challenge is that such programmes are becoming extraordinarily expensive to develop. By sharing costs, expertise and industrial capacity, European governments hope to achieve capabilities that would otherwise be beyond their reach.

Reality check

Despite the perceived commonalities, the FCAS nations – France and Germany in particular – had very different objectives.

For France, the project was never simply about replacing its Rafale fighter jet. Any successor aircraft would eventually have to support the airborne component of France’s nuclear deterrent, operate from its aircraft carrier, and preserve sovereign industrial capabilities – specifically the ability to independently design and build advanced combat aircraft. The insistence by France on design leadership for FCAS therefore reflected concerns about national autonomy, even if portrayed as industrial obstinacy.

Meanwhile Germany, represented by the aerospace giant Airbus, had little interest in financing a programme that was likely to concentrate Europe’s most valuable expertise, intellectual property and design authority in Dassault, the French aerospace company, for decades to come.

These tensions are hardly new. In the 1960s, Britain and France attempted to build the Anglo-French Variable Geometry aircraft. But France’s withdrawal in 1967, for similar reasons to FCAS, led to the project’s collapse.

Other joint European projects have succeeded. For instance, the Panavia Tornado. And in the 1980s, the Eurofighter consortium was developed. This time, despite France withdrawing (to produce the Rafale), the UK, Germany and Italy proceeded (with Spain later joining) with what would become the Eurofighter Typhoon.

Reliance on America

For decades, therefore, European collaborative programmes have been expected to do several things at once: deliver military capability and sustain national industries while strengthening diplomatic relationships or at least not upsetting them.

That may have been a manageable compromise when Europe’s security was underwritten by the United States and the threat from Russian appeared contained. It is far harder to justify when European governments are warning that the continent must rearm.

The challenge is compounded by the changing relationship between governments and industry. Unlike Airbus, which remains partly state-owned, Dassault is controlled by the family that bears its name.

This reflects a broader trend of European governments often exercising less influence over major defence firms than they did during the cold war, when state ownership and greater industrial competition gave them more leverage. This is to say nothing of the tech firms increasingly fundamental to military capability.

That matters because armed forces are built over decades, not electoral cycles. If European governments struggle to mobilise industry to meet their defence requirements, they may find themselves confronting capability gaps at precisely the moment they are trying to deter aggression.

Germany’s defence minister, Boris Pistorious, has already outlined three alternatives to FCAS. The first and simplest is to buy more F-35s from the US. But this would fall short of Germany’s requirements while also deepening dependence on the US – something European nations are keen to avoid.

The second option is to join another collaboration, most likely the UK-Italian-Japanese effort to build a sixth-generation fighter, called the Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP). Germany’s growing defence budget could provide the project with additional funding and a larger order book. But it would also raise questions about influence.

If Berlin rejected a subordinate role within FCAS, it is unlikely to accept one within GCAP. Existing partners may therefore conclude that the benefits of expansion are outweighed by the risks of delay to a programme targeting entry into service by 2035.

The third option is a German-led effort, being discussed through the proposed Team Gen 6 industrial grouping – an Airbus-led alliance of eight defence firms. This would solve industry concerns, preserve German design ambitions and might allow Berlin to build a coalition with other partners, such as Spain and Sweden.

But it could be prohibitively expensive, risky, and by further fragmenting Europe’s already crowded combat aircraft landscape, reduce the viability of all the existing programmes. France faces similarly difficult choices. It can pursue a national successor to Rafale, preserving control over industrial, nuclear and carrier requirements but accepting substantial costs. Or it could seek a revised collaborative framework.

In the meantime, both French president Emmanuel Macron and Germany’s chancellor Friedrich Merz have made clear that other opportunities for collaboration exist, such as the drones intended to support the FCAS fighter jet, or the main aircraft’s engine.

The experience of FCAS is not that Europe cannot cooperate. History shows otherwise, and GCAP may yet again demonstrate that a pragmatic coalition can succeed where a more politically ambitious partnership failed.

What FCAS does reveal, however, is a growing mismatch between Europe’s security environment, the way it continues to procure defence equipment and the costs involved. The recent resignation of Britain’s defence secretary, John Healey, amid disputes over defence funding, points to the same problem.

European governments increasingly agree on the threats they face, but remain “unwilling” to make the financial and political compromises required to address them. That should concern us all.

Arun Dawson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.