This exhibition whose Venice-wide marketing barely mentions the artist is inexplicably seductive despite the studied amateurishness of the cultural diplomacy that gave rise to it. The whole thing is backwards. The theatre designer Kadyri turned a cavernous Arsenale warehouse into the backstage area of some unspecified celebratory event. She prepped stacks of embroidered cloth and craft wares for a folklore display dance like those put on when a dignitary visits town. 

But everyone’s a VIP at the world’s largest drop-in cultural centre. Even Kadyri’s independent young artists’ collective boasts an “executive director”. The whole project thus reads like a self-referential press release maliciously corrupted by the AI which the artist used to design some of her nostalgia-trap patterns. This dissonance might be intentional. If it isn’t, so much for the better.