If you’re an artist who knows you should be at Venice, but once again you were not selected, here’s an option for you: be selected by a pavilion of a country without many artists of its own.

Andorra, the Vatican, the Maldives, Tuvalu… these are all on the haloed list of ‘Partecipazioni Nazionali’ but they are countries without ‘Biennale-worthy’ artists. Tuvalu and the Maldives seem to count on Venitian sympathy for their plight as soon-to-be-drowned nations.

The tiny Pacific Island nation is banking on art succeeding where politicians and scientists have failed in raising awareness of how climate change threatens its future.

If warnings that Tuvalu might slip beneath the waves by the end of this century have fallen on cold hearts, perhaps a dose of abstract realism might help?

“By delivering a statement at the UN General Assembly, UN climate talks and the COP meetings every year, we seem to be talking to deaf ears,” Tuvalu Minister of Foreign Affairs Apisai Ielemia told RTCC.