The Rulers of Venice: In Thrilling Book, Biennale Curators Tell All
By Andrew Russeth
Being picked to curate the Venice Biennale’s main exhibition is a bit like winning the American presidency. You have to be a generational talent, but you also need luck. Charisma helps, as does a zest for back-room intrigue and a stomach for media scrutiny. Granted immense power, you immediately face formidable challenges.
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Since 1993, there have been five U.S. presidents and 17 Biennale curators, 16 of whom are interviewed in High Waters: An Oral History of the Venice Biennale (JRP Editions), a thrilling new book that illuminates what it’s like to hold the job. It was edited by Massimiliano Gioni, the New Museum artistic director behind the 2013 Biennale, who spoke with some curators before their shows opened and others over the past few years. (The Italian impresario Germano Celant, who organized 1997, is the lone absence; he died in 2020, before Gioni met with him.)
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A toothsome volume. Image courtesy JRP Editions
These lucky few are candid as they discuss their proposals, their often-herculean efforts, and their complaints (about money, mostly). “What do you think distinguishes Venice from all the other biennials?” Gioni asked Okwui Enwezor, the Nigerian curator who did 2015, before answering the question himself. “Unfortunately, we know that the real answer is actually the budget—or the lack of it.” (Gioni was given about €2 million and raised another €1.5 million.)
Swedish museum director Daniel Birnbaum’s financial crash–era edition in 2009 got less funding than the previous one, he said. “It was certainly not an overproduced luxury show, believe me.”
That problem aside, what really distinguishes the Venice Biennale, the curators agreed, is its enormous international audience, its much-debated structure (scores of national pavilions and collateral events alongside the big show), its sprawling history, and the way that those factors can inspire the best in artists, their supporters, and the curators themselves. When time is short and finances are precarious, camaraderie emerges.
At top, Adriano Pedrosa, curator of the 2024 Venice Biennale; at bottom, Cecilia Alemani, curator of the 2022 show. Photos by Stefano Mazzola/Getty Images
The Brazilian curator Adriano Pedrosa marveled that far-flung museums covered shipping costs so that works from their collections could be in his loan-heavy 2024 show, and María de Corral, who did 2005 with Rosa Martínez, mentioned an unnamed famous painter who “arrived with his gallerist, both of them with hammers and nails to help install the paintings.”
Martínez and de Corral were the first women to do the show, after 110 years, and they had just eight months to plan it. “I thought they could handle the load,” the American Robert Storr said. He suggested the Spaniards to the Biennale’s leadership after being approached for 2005 and deciding that he needed more time. (He did 2007 instead.)
Even in the mere 33 years covered by High Waters, the 131-year-old Biennale has been an impressively malleable institution, changing with the times and under the control of its ambitious curators, who have divergent views on the actual point of the show.
In American in Venice: Robert Storr at his 2007 Venice Biennale. Photo by Alberto Pizzoli/AFP via Getty Images
Ralph Rugoff, the American in charge of 2019, argued that the Biennale “has to be grounded in its own time; it’s almost like a recording device.” For Birnbaum, it “should be a site for experimentation.” But the Italian Cecilia Alemani (Gioni’s wife), who helmed 2022, maintained that “the idea that the Biennale should be only preoccupied with the present is a very recent assumption.” The 1948 edition included a survey of Impressionism: old news by then.
“There are no rules, of course, and the Biennale should be reinvented every two years,” Pedrosa said. Those reinventions have always varied in quality, though there is a sense among a few interviewees that it has lost some of its venturesome spirit lately.
The irrepressible Italian curator Francesco Bonami likes to remember his iteration as “the ‘last’ Biennale.” True, “there have been huge, exceptional shows in Venice since 2003,” he said, “but no longer Biennales in the sense of almost catastrophic events, destined to radically change the way we think about what a large exhibition can be.”
“The pressures to serve the market just keep getting stronger,” Storr said.
At top, Bice Curiger in her 2011 Venice Biennale with Israeli President Shimon Peres and Paolo Baratta, the Biennale’s president; at middle, Achille Bonito Oliva, curator of the 1993 show, enjoys a quiet moment amid the 2011 edition; at bottom, Okwui Enwezor, head of 2015, with Baratta outside the Haus der Kunst in Munich. Photos by Barbara Zanon/Getty Images, Massimo Di Nonno/Getty Images, and Joerg Koch/Getty Images
Enwezor looks back fondly to 1974, when the event was dedicated to supporting Chile under Pinochet. Back then, he said, “it seemed that the institution did not have to be so cautious, that it could think in political as well as cultural and artistic terms.”
It’s certainly true that Biennale curators do not have quite the latitude that they once did. The swashbuckling Achille Bonito Oliva (1993) brags about commandeering the pavilion of Slobodan Milošević’s Serbia (“which I couldn’t really do”) and being “directly involved in the decision” for Joseph Kosuth to represent the U.S. His successor, the French art historian Jean Clair (the first non-Italian to get the nod, for the centenary outing in 1995) had a different relationship with the pavilions: “Of course I didn’t meddle with that.”
Bonami’s gambit of asking 11 other curators to curate sections of his unwieldy show apparently led to a prohibition against such delegating, and Gioni floated as a “legend” that the Biennale curator is contractually forbidden from moving to Venice full time, allegedly because of Storr’s extended stay. “Some people say it is because you were there for so long that you drove them crazy,” Gioni told him. The curator at least continues to have at their disposal a private motor taxi during opening week.
Clockwise from top left: Francesco Bonami, who organized the 2003 Venice Biennale, in the city in 2009; Harald Szeemann, who did 1999 and 2001, in Vienna in 1986; and Christine Macel at her 2017 show. Photos by Daniele Venturelli/WireImage, Imagno/Getty Images, Vincenzo Pinto/AFP via Getty Images
Bits of gossip and hints of tension are sprinkled throughout. Storr actually signed on to do both 2007 and 2009, but “it was clear we wouldn’t be able to continue working together because I had been so resistant to their pressures,” he said of the Biennale’s administrators.
The Swiss pioneer Harald Szeemann is the only person to have done it twice, late in his life, in 1999 and 2001, after he had lost interest in the festival. “I had stopped going to Venice; I’d grown tired of the institution and the power games revolving around it,” he said. “When they called me, I told them they’d have to muster the courage to compete with Kassel and Documenta.” (Szeemann, who died in 2005, appears via a 2001 interview with curator Jens Hoffmann.)
For almost everyone, the gig is the high point—the high-water mark—of their careers. (Szeemann and Enwezor are the exceptions, having already produced more important Documentas.) “Working on a project of that scale and complexity is something that you can only do once in your life,” the French curator Christine Macel (2017’s chief) said.
Life after the Biennale has some of the awkwardness and fraught potential of the post-presidency in the U.S.: You can join the gravy train, but your glory days are probably behind you. “Everything I did was in the shadow of what to me was a marvelous disaster,” Bonami said.
At top, the third individual from the left is the Biennale’s Joern Brandmeyer, while the other people, left to right, comprise Koyo Kouoh’s team: Siddhartha Mitter, Rasha Salti, Marie Hélène Pereira, Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, and Rory Tsapayi. At bottom is Ralph Rugoff, 2019’s chief. Photos by Stefano Mazzola/Getty Images and Tiziana Fabi/AFP via Getty Images
This year’s pick, Cameroonian-Swiss curator Koyo Kouoh, never got to experience that arc. She died in March 2025, while still planning her show. The five-person team she selected to complete it spoke with Gioni, and they express a heartening commitment to her vision. One member, journalist Siddhartha Mitter, said that because of Kouoh’s death, “there will be a lot of gaps—geographical gaps, perhaps gaps in types of practices—and that’s just the way it is.”
It’s a bittersweet final interview in a volume that is far more moving than I would have expected. These power players, it quickly becomes clear, are true believers. They have faith what grand art exhibitions can do, and even more so, what great art can do. “We can still allow ourselves to be idealistic,” Szeemann said. “I think it’s important to keep doing that.”
Top, Daniel Birnbaum in the Giardini, amid his 2009 Biennale. Bottom, the co-curator of 2005, María De Corral; the Biennale’s president at the time, Davide Croff; and billionaire collector Francois Pinault. Photos Massimo Di Nonno/Getty Images and Filippo Monteforte/AFP via Getty Images
Even with all the frustrations that the Biennale has caused them, these individuals are still awed by it. They know it intimately, and yet it still somehow eludes them.
“Long live the Biennale,” Curiger said, “with all its paradoxes: it’s such a big show, a show of shows, which ends up overwhelming everybody, even the most expert professionals.” (Never again feel guilty about missing a few pavilions!)
Birnbaum is even willing to admit that many of his artists’ projects were “so fluid and open-ended that I wasn’t even quite sure what they were, actually.”
Who hasn’t felt some variation of that while wandering the city on day three or four, tired but hopeful, on the hunt for that one artwork that is going to blow you away and maybe even change your life? (Sometimes it even happens.)
Enwezor captures the magic of the whole affair concisely. “The Biennale, and Venice itself,” he said, “carry the force and the density of a deep historical relationship to art, and therefore a deeper mystery.”
This article was originally published by Artnet News.