Help! I Hate... My Pavilion

Every week, The Art Journal's resident artworld Agony Aunt Charlotte Jansen answers your questions about access, gatekeeping and sticky social problems

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I had the honour of curating my country’s national pavilion at the Venice Biennale. It should feel like the proudest moment of my career. Everyone keeps congratulating me, telling me how huge it is, how lucky I am. And I know they’re right. But quietly, I can’t shake the feeling that it didn’t go the way I hoped. The exhibition never quite landed. Reviews were polite but lukewarm. Visitors seemed confused about what we were trying to say. Conversations drifted away from the ideas that felt so urgent and clear when we were making it. I feel guilty for even admitting this. How can I feel disappointed when I’ve been given such an incredible opportunity? Is it ungrateful to feel this way after such a massive career milestone? 

What you’re feeling is the emotional hangover of a dream fulfilled. We grow up believing that career milestones arrive wrapped in some kind of permanent satisfaction. Instead, they often arrive followed by a strange silence and a rasping voice in your head whispering: “Was that it? Shouldn’t I feel more?” There’s a reason the Zazen Buddhists steer well clear of self-referential excitement and excessive stimulation. 

The truth no one tells you about ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ opportunities is that they are also, ultimately, once-in-a-lifetime pressures. A national pavilion isn’t just an exhibition – it’s expectation, projection, diplomacy, funding applications, deadlines and a thousand invisible conversations about what a country is supposed to say. By the time the doors open, the work is carrying far more weight than any regular exhibition would ever reasonably bear. Add to the fact the entire ‘anyone-who-is-anyone’ of the global artworld descends to pick it apart – your head is bound to be spinning. Because this moment doesn’t feel transcendent, you assume the failure must be yours.

Large exhibitions on the global stage are strange creatures. I have been quite shocked at the critical reviews published in the UK about this year’s biennale. Visitors simply can’t get their head around such a huge affair, they don’t spend enough time engaging with the art. Everyone is with manic expectations and an insatiable desire to post on social media. But exhibitions need to move slower than that. They are almost always misunderstood in real time and are only properly interpreted later, often by entirely different people. The idea that everyone ‘gets it’ immediately is one of the cruellest myths in cultural work. Some of the most celebrated projects in history were, at the moment of their unveiling, described as confusing and underwhelming, or worse, were simply ignored.

And here is the part you might not want to hear: the Venice Biennale is not designed to give you closure. It is designed to keep moving. It’s just like sport (as it’s often described, our industry’s Olympic Games). Pavilions open, crowds pass through, conversations scatter across continents and meaning forms months or even years later in classrooms, studios, essays and anecdotes. You don’t and possibly won’t get to witness most of the impact of what you made. And then perhaps, eventually, it will be forgotten, maybe for decades, maybe forever. Does everyone remember Eric Moussambani, the Equatorial Guinean swimmer, dubbed Eric the Eel, who swam the 100m freestyle at the Sydney Olympics in 2000? He won his heat in record slow time after his competitors were disqualified. People thought he was drowning, but he embodied the Olympic spirit. It was also his first ever swim in an official Olympic-sized pool.

I was reminded of this story by a friend who is related to Moussambani as we wandered around the Equatorial Guinean pavilion – the country’s first participation in the biennale – before we took the Allilaguna back to the airport. It reminded me that often it’s the spirit of the thing that counts, not the thing itself. Right now, it seems to me you’re mistaking the absence of immediate understanding for the absence of meaning.

You are also grieving the perfect one that lived in your head before budgets, logistics, politics and reality entered the room. Every curator, I am sure, secretly mourns that exhibition, the same way all creatives, and possibly all people do, when they imagine a big event. But flawless, perfectly received, universally understood exists nowhere except in hindsight.

And there is another kind of quiet, unacknowledged grief underneath this: the end of anticipation. For years, this Biennale was a future event that glowed bright on the horizon for you. While you were working toward it, it contained possibility. Now it belongs to the past. Even joy can feel strangely hollow when the long build-up suddenly disappears and you’re left without the project that structured your days, your anxieties, your ambitions. Excitement and anxiety are two sides of the same coin.

There is a peculiar loneliness of finishing something so public. Thousands of people walk through the space, yet the internal experience of making it — the compromises, the risks, the late-night doubts — belongs almost entirely to you and a small circle of collaborators. When the doors open, the private journey ends abruptly and the public narrative begins. It can feel like watching strangers discuss a person you know intimately while you stand quietly at the edge of the room.

I don’t think feeling disappointed makes you ungrateful. It makes you someone who cares. When the stakes are this high, there’s a voice that says: “I did something big.” The other asks: “Did I do it well enough?” If you felt nothing but triumph, I’d worry you hadn’t risked very much. 

You might also be discovering that success rarely delivers the emotional clarity we expect. We imagine a finish line but in reality there is only a handover: one chapter closes, another begins, and we are left holding the complicated feelings in between. Let the congratulations sit beside the disappointment. And please remember: careers are not defined by how a single moment feels from the inside. They are shaped by what you learn once the applause fades. This experience will, I am sure, inform every decision you make next — what risks to take, what pressures to resist, what kind of work matters most to you. Be gentle with yourself. 

Then again, you don’t mention which national pavilion you curated. Maybe you were the curator of the Russian pavilion. In which case, I might have to say that yes, perhaps you need to really reflect on your choices and face the fact you failed miserably on this one. Blasting horrendous music across the Giardini and handing out a week’s worth of free champagne funded by your government was never going to land well with the ongoing atrocities committed in that government’s name.