New Delhi, May 11 -- It was supposed to be a party. The trappings were all there: an open bar, resplendent pink flowers, a musician, scheduled DJ sets. And yet something was amiss-in fact, lots of somethings. In the Russian pavilion at the 61st edition of the Venice Biennale (pictured below), irony was everywhere yet acknowledged nowhere.

"Why do flowers no longer smell?", a seven-paragraph, mind-wilting description, accompanied a floral sculpture-which did, in fact, smell. A bin filled with a jumble of clothing and sign declaring "tutto a 0€" was not intended to evoke refugees displaced by Russia's war in Ukraine, but who could think of anything else? And then there was the spokesperson wearing a black-and-white striped mask and C...