Biennale Uprisings, Looted Legacies Unravel

The Louvre is reopening the Apollo Gallery in July, and its new director, Christophe Leribault, is using that moment to signal a reset after last October’s heist. He told Le Monde the gallery—Louis XIV’s ornate reception hall—will reopen without its display cases of the Sun King’s minerals, which are being moved to the Richelieu wing so the Romantic Apollo wall paintings can dominate the space, almost like the Louvre’s own Hall of Mirrors. With France’s crown jewels still missing and five people charged, plans are also moving ahead for a new display of Empress Eugénie’s diamond-and-emerald crown, now under restoration after thieves dropped and crushed it—only 10 of more than one thousand three hundred diamonds were lost.

The Art Newspaper digs into the stubborn pattern of war now, looting later—and the legal patchwork meant to slow it down. The 1954 Hague Convention requires countries to prevent theft and pillage of cultural property during armed conflict, and its protocol bars export from occupied territories, requiring other countries to seize unlawful exports and repatriate them when hostilities end. Around 110 countries have signed, including market nations like the UK, France, and the Netherlands. The US hasn’t signed, though its cultural property laws offer some protection. The problem is that the protocol focuses on “occupation,” leaving looting in broader wartime chaos less addressed. The piece also points to EU Regulation 2019/880 as a checkpoint system and general prohibition on unlawfully removed goods entering the EU.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg, Jr., announced on April 28 that his office returned 657 trafficked antiquities to India, valued at nearly fourteen dollars million. The items were recovered through investigations by the D.A.’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit and Homeland Security Investigations, and formally returned at a ceremony in New York attended by the D.A.’s office and the Consulate General of India. Among the pieces: a two dollars million bronze Avalokiteshvara, one of a trove of 7th–8th century bronzes found at Sirpur in 1939, later held at the Mahant Ghasidas Memorial Museum in Raipur, stolen by 1982, and seized from a private New York collection in 2025. A seven dollars million red sandstone standing Buddha was recovered from a New York storage unit linked to convicted trafficker Subhash Kapoor.

A father and daughter from Lawrence, New Jersey—Erwin Bankowski and Karolina Bankowska—pleaded guilty on April 28 in federal court in Brooklyn to a five-year counterfeit-art scheme that sold more than 200 fakes and defrauded buyers of at least two dollars million. According to prosecutors, the works were pitched as by Andy Warhol, Pablo Picasso, Banksy, Raimond Staprans, and Native American artists including Fritz Scholder and Richard Mayhew. From 2020 to 2025, the counterfeits were consigned to reputable galleries and auction houses across the US, selling for two thousand dollars for a fake Banksy protest print up to one hundred sixty thousand dollars for a counterfeit landscape attributed to Mayhew. The duo claimed the works came from private collections tied to artists or shuttered galleries and corporations, and sometimes used forged stamps and certificates on aged paper. Prosecutors are seeking at least one dollars million in restitution.

In Venice, first impressions of the 61st Biennale’s main exhibition, “In Minor Keys,” describe a show pulled apart by the present. The exhibition opens to the public on Saturday, but it arrives after major turmoil: the festival jury resigned last week after controversy around its statement that Israel and Russia would not be considered for prizes, and the juried prize has been replaced with a Eurovision-style people’s choice award. The Biennale is also opening after the sudden death of its curator, the Cape Town–based Koyo Kouoh, who died of cancer last year while putting the exhibition together; a team of five collaborators completed the show using her plans. The review notes standout works, like Big Chief Demond Melanchon’s giant red feathered costume-sculpture in the renovated Central Pavilion, and points to Kouoh’s emphasis on artists from Africa.

Manhattan’s repatriation work to India included details that read like a map of trafficking routes. The D.A.’s office highlighted a sandstone dancing Ganesha that was looted by convicted trafficker Vaman Ghiya and shipped to New York gallery owner Doris Wiener. After Wiener died, her daughter Nancy—later convicted by the D.A.’s office of antiquities trafficking—created a false provenance and sold the piece in 2012 through Christie’s; the buyer surrendered it earlier this year. District Attorney Bragg called the scale of networks targeting India “massive” and said there is “more work to be done.” The Antiquities Trafficking Unit has pursued Subhash Kapoor and associates for over a decade, obtaining an arrest warrant in 2012 and securing convictions of five co-conspirators in 2019. Overall, the unit says it has recovered more than six thousand two hundred cultural treasures valued at over four hundred eighty five dollars million and returned more than five thousand nine hundred objects to 36 countries.

Pussy Riot staged a protest at the Venice Biennale’s Russia Pavilion this morning, with pink smoke, Ukrainian flags, and chants ringing through the Giardini. About 15 members of the all-woman punk feminist collective arrived at 11 a.m. in pink balaclavas and gothic dress, drawing a larger crowd; around 50 protesters, including members of the Ukrainian feminist activist group Femen, occupied the area. Pussy Riot’s founder, Nadya Tolokonnikova, said she wants the official Russian exhibition closed and the pavilion turned over to “the art of oppressed peoples,” and she issued a call to Biennale president Pietrangelo Buttafuoco to meet her. The protest ran about 20 minutes, with performers climbing the pavilion, dancing to punk music, and displaying slogans including “Biennale of Evil” and “Russia kills, Biennale exhibits.” Russia’s return, announced in March, has triggered backlash, including the EU withdrawing €2 million of funding for 2028.

Another Venice flashpoint centers on the awards jury’s resignation and the Israeli Pavilion. New reports say Israeli pavilion artist Belu-Simion Fainaru issued legal warnings alleging antisemitism and nationality-based discrimination after the jury declared it would omit nations “whose leaders are currently charged with crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court,” a statement made April 22 by jurors Elvira Dyangani Ose, Zoe Butt, Marta Kuzma, Giovanna Zapperi, and chair Solange Farkas. Eight days later, the jury resigned via e-flux, prompting the Biennale Foundation to scrap the Golden Lion awards and introduce “Visitor Lions,” chosen by public vote of ticket holders; the Foundation clarified that both Russia and Israel are eligible. Reports also describe the Biennale’s legal department warning jurors they could be personally liable for damages, with potential exposure discussed during an Italian Ministry of Culture investigation between April 29 and April 30.

ARTnews reports that the Art Not Genocide Alliance, or ANGA, is escalating its opposition to the Israeli Pavilion with a 24-hour strike and rally on May 8—one day before the 2026 Venice Biennale opens to the public on Saturday. ANGA formed in objection to Israel’s inclusion in the 2024 Biennale and began calling this year’s presentation, featuring Haifa-based artist Belu-Simion Fainaru, the “Genocide Pavilion” once Israel was announced in January. In March, ANGA released an open letter demanding Israel’s exclusion; it has over 200 signers, including Lubaina Himid, P. Staff, Sophia Al-Maria, Sara Flores, Farah Al Qasimi, Meriem Bennani, Alfredo Jaar, and Gala Porras-Kim, as well as Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo and Rasha Salti from Koyo Kouoh’s curatorial team. The strike begins with a 4:30 p.m. rally in Viale Garibaldi, backed by several Venice labor and culture groups.

In Arizona, US border wall construction damaged a one thousand-year-old piece of Indigenous land art: a 200-foot-long fish-shaped intaglio near the border west of Ajo. The Washington Post reported that crews destroyed a 60-to-70-foot portion of the formation, citing Richard Martynec, a retired archaeologist who volunteers surveying the area. Satellite imagery from April showed a disturbance crossing the intaglio, and later imagery showed bulldozer marks running through about a third of the fish. After the report published on Friday, US Customs and Border Protection confirmed the damage. CBP spokesperson John Mennell said that on April 23, 2026, a contractor “inadvertently disturbed” the Las Playas Intaglio and that the remaining portion has been secured and will be protected in place. Lorraine Marquez Eiler, an elder of the Hia-ced O’odham, compared the destruction to razing revered sites in Washington.

Finally, The Art Newspaper catches up with Arthur Jafa in Venice around Helter Skelter: Richard Prince and Arthur Jafa at the Prada Foundation’s Ca’ Corner della Regina. The show brings together new, existing, and previously unexhibited works about America, selected by Nancy Spector, the former artistic director and chief curator of the Guggenheim New York, in her first institutional survey since leaving the museum in 2020. Spector presents the two as a call-and-response, linking Jafa’s 2016 video Love Is The Message, The Message is Death to the apocalyptic glow of Prince’s early-1980s Sunset photographs. Jafa speaks directly about violence in America—“It’s always been a demonic state, and we love it”—and about how appropriation means something different depending on power, privilege, and race.

That’s today’s download—links are in the show notes. Come back tomorrow for more art world news you can actually use, and until then: Chinga la migra

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