Russian Pavilion at Venice Art Biennale Scrapped as Festivals Weigh Response to Boycott Calls
Nick Vivarelli International CorrespondentDue to the invasion of Ukraine, the Russian pavilion at the upcoming Biennale arts exhibition in Venice has been scrapped, as the Venice Film Festival continues to mull its response to calls for a boycott of Russian movies at the event’s 77th edition.Meanwhile, the Locarno Film Festival said on Monday that it will certainly be showing Russian films at its upcoming edition in August.Kicking off in April, the Venice Biennale, which is the multidisciplinary arts organization behind the Venice Film Festival, expressed solidarity with Russian visual artists Alexandra Sukhareva and Kirill Savchenkov and the exhibition’s curator Raimundas Malašauskas, who on Sunday announced they were pulling out of the art show on their own initiative because “this war is politically and humanly intolerable,” as Malašauskas put it in a statement.