Actor Eric Rasmussen has revealed that he removed his own contribution from an installation at the Venice Biennale as a pro-Israel protest, taking the work back months after the exhibition opened. He described the decision in an op-ed published by the Jewish Journal on Monday 9 November. His submission had been part of Chimera, a 2026 installation by the residency programme Denniston Hill in the main exhibition curated by Koyo Kouoh in the Giardini.

Rasmussen's contribution was an acetate panel carrying two drawings by his mother of Adolf Hitler, taken from a notebook she kept as a child in 1943. The drawings show a moustachioed man with numbers and text reading, in part, that Mister Hitler is invaded. Rasmussen had previously used the drawing in a performance during his 2019 residency at Denniston Hill, which he attended through the DPAA Workshop. The panel sat within Chimera, an exquisite-corpse style work built from contributions by dozens of the programme's past residents.

Rasmussen said he acted after Denniston Hill sent an email in mid-May noting that the organisation was among more than 70 Biennale participants who had signed an open letter objecting to the Biennale's claims of political neutrality, and that it was aligning with ANGA, the Art Not Genocide Alliance. The alliance has repeatedly protested Israel's presence at the Biennale and notes that Palestine has no official pavilion. Rasmussen wrote that he believed the programme supported the eradication of Israel, and asked for the drawing back in a lengthy email. Denniston Hill complied.

ARTnews confirmed from installation photographs that the drawing was on view when the Biennale opened in May, and that it appears to have been removed at some point after mid-May. Denniston Hill was co-founded by artists kara lynch, Julie Mehretu, Paul Pfeiffer and Jessica Rankin, with art historian Lawrence Chua and curator Beth Stryker, and is based in upstate New York. The Biennale's main exhibition closes later this month, and the episode has become one of the closing controversies of an edition already marked by protests over the war in Gaza.