Anger has been growing among art critics at the use of a fishing vessel – in which at least 700 people died – as an exhibition at Venice Biennale.
The boat was travelling between Libya and Italy when it sank in April 2015.
Hundreds of migrants, many from Africa, were hidden in the hull.
Swiss-Icelandic artist Christoph Büchel brought the ship to the exhibition with the intention to highlight it as a “a relic of a human tragedy but also a monument to contemporary migration”, he said in a statement.
But art critics complain that there are no notices explaining what the boat is, creating an environment where people are sipping aperitifs and taking selfies.
They call it barbarous, vile, abhorrent, and mawkish.
