metropolis m

As a child growing up in Tehran, I remember seeing images of the Venice Biennale and learning that each country had a pavilion. A house for the nation. A room in which “we” would appear before the world. It sounded simple. Even dignified. But I never recognised myself in that “we”. 

Since 1979, after the Islamic Revolution, Iran’s participation in Venice has been organised by the Islamic Republic through the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance and the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. When Iran appears on that stage, it is the state that appears. Artists are selected within a framework of ideological acceptability. The pavilion becomes less a reflection of a living art scene and more a tool of cultural diplomacy, an image carefully arranged to suggest coherence. 

The Iran I knew, and the artists I grew up with, were rarely visible in that image. There have been occasional moments, dependent on shifts within government, when selections felt closer to the broader contemporary scene. But those moments never altered the structure itself. The frame remained intact. 

And that frame is not unique to Iran. A national pavilion is granted to a government. Cultural presence is tied to sovereignty. When sovereignty is authoritarian, the distortion is obvious. But the model does not become neutral simply because a government is liberal. The Biennale rests on a basic assumption: that a nation can be presented as a legible subject through an exhibition. A flag marks the entrance. Inside, a selection of works stands in for something called collective identity. 

At the 2024 Biennale, Iran’s pavilion focused on Gaza and Palestine. Some read it as solidarity. Others saw a government projecting moral authority abroad while suppressing dissent at home. At the same time, Israel’s pavilion was fiercely contested amid the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Israel appears in Venice as a recognised state with a pavilion. Gaza does not. Palestine does not. Gaza enters the space indirectly, filtered through another state’s narrative. 

This is not accidental. The Biennale is organised around recognised states. Stateless peoples, occupied territories and fractured sovereignties do not automatically translate into rooms. Visibility follows recognition. 

The process sounds simple: a country selects artists, and those artists represent a culture. But cultures do not move in unison. They are made of disagreements, ruptures, competing memories, incompatible desires. When a pavilion is labelled “national,” something is compressed. Even when the works are critical, even when they speak against power, the structure still presents a coherent subject to the world. 

In Iran today, after decades of repression and renewed violence against protesters, and most recently the massacre of demonstrators in the streets, struggles over who speaks for the nation are unfolding everywhere. 

The Islamic Republic presents itself as the nation. Monarchists rally around the son of the former Shah, invoking unity as necessity. In that language of unity, disagreement quickly becomes disloyalty. At the same time, positions around Gaza and Israel redraw alliances within Iranian politics itself, while absorbing Iranian struggles into broader geopolitical blocs. Again, multiplicity is folded into a single voice. 

The Biennale does not invent this. But it mirrors it. By organising culture through national pavilions, it accepts that governments are the legitimate bearers of cultural identity. It treats an exhibition as if it can stand in for a population. 

So what does it mean to be represented? Who decides the “we” at the entrance of a pavilion? When an internationally recognised state appears as a cultural subject while those without sovereignty have no pavilion of their own, what forms of legitimacy are quietly reinforced? When a government accused of silencing its citizens presents itself as a voice of solidarity for others, what exactly is being staged? 

For those who have grown up inside these contradictions, this is not theoretical. To stand in front of a pavilion carrying the name of your country and feel no recognition is a particular kind of distance. You are present in the image, but absent from its authorship. 

As long as the nation-state remains the frame through which culture is authorised, the fracture does not disappear. It travels with us. Between what is shown and what is lived. Between who speaks and who is spoken for.