On a sun-drenched Easter Sunday, 28 April 2024, an 87-year-old man in white arrived by helicopter on the island of Giudecca. He did not come to St Mark’s Basilica, nor to the Doge’s Palace. He came to a women’s prison – and to an art exhibition that had turned a former convent for reformed prostitutes into one of the most talked-about venues in the history of the Venice Biennale. Pope Francis, hobbled by chronic knee pain and navigating the lagoon city by wheelchair, golf buggy and motorboat, became the first pontiff ever to attend the Biennale. In doing so, he delivered a message that cut through the art world’s habitual ambivalence about institutional faith: the world needs artists, and artists need to look.
The five-hour itinerary encompassed a meeting with roughly 80 female inmates, an address to artists in the prison chapel, a youth gathering at the Basilica of Santa Maria della Salute, and a Mass before 10,000 people in St Mark’s Square – the Pope’s first trip beyond Rome in seven months. But the centrepiece was the Holy See Pavilion itself: With My Eyes (Con i miei occhi), installed not in a white cube but within the working cells, corridors, and staff cafeterias of the Casa di Reclusione Femminile Venezia Giudecca.
A Prison Becomes a Pavilion
The Venice Biennale, founded in 1895, has a long history of unlikely spatial experiments. National pavilions have occupied everything from Neo-Classical temples to repurposed naval arsenals. But mounting the Vatican’s contribution inside a functioning women’s detention facility – where visitors must pass through security checks and reservations are mandatory – was a curatorial provocation without precedent. Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça, the Portuguese poet-turned-prefect of the Dicastery for Culture and Education who served as Commissioner, described the decision in March 2024 as deliberate: “It is not a coincidence that the Holy See has chosen to present its Pavilion in a seemingly unexpected place.” The location was the message.
The pavilion’s title draws on a cross-fade between Shakespeare’s Sonnet 141 – “I do not love thee with mine eyes” – and the Book of Job, 42:5 – “now mine eye seeth thee.” Chiara Parisi, director of the Centre Pompidou-Metz, and Bruno Racine, CEO of Venice’s Palazzo Grassi–Punta della Dogana, shaped an exhibition where the inmates themselves become co-narrators – accompanying visitors as “conferencers” and contributing poetry inscribed directly onto the prison walls.
The Artists Inside
The exhibitors read like a roll call of contemporary art’s most provocative and spiritually attuned practitioners. Maurizio Cattelan contributed a vast black-and-white mural of two filthy feet, an allusion to Caravaggio’s gritty apostolic realism and to the annual Holy Thursday foot-washing ritual Francis performs on prisoners. Claire Fontaine, the Palermo-based collective whose neon sculptures Foreigners Everywhere gave the 60th Biennale its overarching title, installed a sign reading “siamo con voi nella notte” – “we are with you through the night” – glowing against the prison’s institutional corridors.
Sonia Gomes hung objects from the ceiling of the Church of La Maddalena, drawing the viewer’s gaze upward – a literal enactment of the pavilion’s preoccupation with looking. Simone Fattal’s totemic forms, Claire Tabouret’s paintings, Marco Perego’s short film starring his wife Zoe Saldana alongside the inmates, and the posthumous inclusion of Corita Kent – the Catholic nun and pop-artist-turned-social-activist whose vibrant serigraphs promoting tolerance were displayed in the staff cafeteria – completed an exhibition that defied easy categorisation.
The Biennale itself, under Adriano Pedrosa’s curation, had set the stage. Foreigners Everywhere – drawn from a Claire Fontaine series begun in 2004, appropriated from a Turin anti-racist collective – was a celebration of the foreign, the outsider, the queer, and the indigenous, as we explored in our analysis of the Biennale’s platform for marginalised artists. With 331 artists selected, roughly a third more than 2022, the 60th Biennale declared that the margins are the centre. The Holy See Pavilion did not merely participate in this theme; it radicalised it, placing the viewer inside the very structure that most embodies society’s impulse to exclude.
“The World Needs Artists”
Francis’s address in the prison chapel was vintage Bergoglio: direct, morally urgent, and laced with intellectual seriousness. “I very much wanted to come to the Venice Art Biennale to return a visit, as is the good custom among friends,” he began, referencing the 200 artists he had welcomed to the Sistine Chapel in June 2023 for the 50th anniversary of the Vatican Museums’ Modern and Contemporary Art Collection. “Last June, I had the joy of welcoming a large group of artists to the Sistine Chapel. Now I am coming ‘to your home’ to meet you personally.”
The core of his message was both affirmation and warning. “The world needs artists,” he declared – a statement carrying particular weight from the leader of a Church that has historically oscillated between patronage and suspicion of contemporary art. He praised the exhibitors as “visionaries who can see beyond the boundaries of our world” but pivoted to a sharper critique: “It is more urgent now than ever to know how to distinguish clearly art from the market. Certainly, the market promotes and canonises, but there is always the risk that it will prey on creativity, steal innocence and, finally, coldly instruct on what is to be done.” In a single paragraph, Francis articulated the central tension of the contemporary art economy with more precision than most art criticism manages in thousands of words.
He named three women artists – Frida Kahlo, Corita Kent, and Louise Bourgeois – as exemplars of what he called “co-protagonists of the human adventure.” The choice was deliberate: each had worked at the intersection of personal pain and universal questioning.
Cities of Refuge
The Pope’s most arresting metaphor drew on the Old Testament concept of cities of refuge – designated sanctuaries where offenders could seek asylum from blood vengeance. “I beg you, dear artists, to imagine cities that do not yet exist on the maps: cities where no human being is considered a stranger,” he said. “It would be important if the various artistic practices could establish themselves everywhere as a sort of network of cities of refuge, cooperating to rid the world of the senseless and empty contrasts that seek to gain ground in racism, xenophobia, inequality, ecological imbalance and in the ‘fear of the poor’.”
The phrase “fear of the poor” – paura dei poveri – landed with particular force. In a Europe convulsed by debates over migration and asylum, and in an art market where seven-figure sales coexist with housing crises, the Pope demanded that art assume a civic responsibility transcending aesthetic autonomy. The Biennale’s theme had already framed this question; Francis pressed it further, insisting that art’s highest function was not representation but sanctuary.
He concluded with a warning about the digital age’s distorting effect on attention: “We live in an age marked by the dominance of the digital world and the triumph of distance communication technologies, which propose an increasingly remote and indirect human gaze, running the risk of becoming detached from reality itself.” The pavilion’s title was, in this reading, an antidote – an insistence on embodied, proximate, unmediated encounter. Seeing with one’s own eyes, as the Cardinal’s curatorial statement noted, “confers a unique status to vision, as it involves us directly in reality and makes us not spectators, but witnesses.”
The Art World Responds
The Vatican pavilion was hailed as one of the Biennale’s standout attractions – an “unusual art world darling,” as the Associated Press described it. The Art Newspaper reported that Francis had singled out Corita Kent for particular praise, placing the former nun’s populist graphic art in a lineage stretching from the early Christian basilicas to the murals of the Chicano movement.
Not all commentary was uncritical. Some questioned whether mounting the exhibition in a women’s prison risked aestheticising incarceration – turning the inmates’ lives into a backdrop for institutional self-congratulation. The tension was real: the inmates were not merely subjects but active collaborators, their poetry and presence woven into the fabric of the exhibition. Whether this constituted genuine empowerment or sophisticated co-option remained, as with all institutional art of the margins, a matter of interpretation.
The Holy See had participated in the Venice Biennale for the first time in 2013, under Pope Benedict XVI, with a pavilion inspired by the Book of Genesis – a period when the global South was beginning to reshape the Biennale’s geography. It returned in 2015 with works by Monika Bravo, Mario Macilau, and Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva. But the 2024 pavilion was qualitatively different: not merely an exhibition of art by or about faith, but an institution – the Vatican itself – physically embedding its cultural output within the social infrastructure of punishment and rehabilitation. The prison was not a metaphor. It was the venue.
A Legacy in the Lagoon
In St Mark’s Square, addressing the Mass congregation, Francis returned to Venice itself – its fragility, its beauty, its vulnerability to rising waters. “Venice is one with the waters on which it stands, and without the care and protection of this natural environment it could even cease to exist,” he warned, at a moment when Mayor Luigi Brugnaro had just introduced a €5 charge for day visitors to combat overtourism.
But it was the quieter image that endured: a Pope in a wheelchair, surrounded by inmates and artists in a prison chapel hung with Sonia Gomes’s suspended objects, listening. “We all need to be gazed at and to dare to gaze at ourselves,” Francis had said. The Holy See Pavilion was, in the end, an act of reciprocal looking – the Church seeing contemporary art, contemporary art seeing the Church, and both seeing the women whose stories neither institution had previously thought to centre.
Whether that reciprocal gaze would endure beyond the Biennale’s closing on 24 November 2024 was an open question. But on Easter Sunday 2024, in a prison on an island in a lagoon, the oldest institution in the Western world and the newest impulses in contemporary art found, if not common ground, then at least a shared direction of sight.
