The head of the Venice Biennale has a simple defense for one of the most contentious decisions of this year’s exhibition:  it’s not a courtroom . Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, the Biennale’s president, made the remark on Wednesday this week as backlash mounted over the return of Russia to the Giardini. The country is reopening its pavilion for the first time since its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, a move that has drawn criticism from European officials and triggered threats to pull roughly $2.3 million in EU funding.  Related Articles “The Biennale is not a court; it is a garden of peace,” Buttafuoco said, arguing that the exhibition should remain a place for dialogue rather than exclusion. “This whole world born of ​the French Revolution, the Enlightenment and secularism has flipped into its exact opposite: a laboratory ⁠of ⁠intolerance, and demands for censorship, ⁠closure and ​exclusion,” he said in a press conference. That’s the theory.…