She is British, has never visited Ukraine and has no ties with the country. Yet Sam Taylor-Wood, the provocative former Turner Prize nominee, is representing it at the Venice Biennale, the world’s foremost contemporary art fair, to the dismay of native Ukrainians.

While Tracey Emin is representing Britain, among 75 other countries showing off their artists in national pavilions, Taylor-Wood – who made a pornographic film featuring masturbation and an hour-long video of the footballer David Beckham asleep – is promoting Ukraine with art that bears no relation to it.

She was selected by Peter Doroshenko, the American-born director of Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, one of Europe’s biggest arts complexes, which was labelled the North’s answer to Tate Modern when it opened in 2002.

With his close links to Ukraine – his parents came from there and he is president of the Pinchuk Art Centre in Kiev – the country asked him to be its commissioner for the Venice Biennale.

He has selected eight artists, only four of whom are Ukrainian: Serhiy Bratkov, Alexander Hnilitsky, Lesia Zaiats and Boris Mikhailov. The rest are two British artists, Taylor-Wood and Mark Titchner; an American, Dzine – or Carlos Rolon; and a German, Jürgen Teller.

Mr Doroshenko told The Times that he wanted the exhibition to explore what it meant to be Ukrainian today. Non-Ukrainian artists were able to address the subject from the outside, he said.

He accepted that there was criticism by some Ukrainian artists and critics but said: “It’s not necessarily a bad thing to be criticised. It makes you more focused. The criticism was not so much on me, but against the ministry.”

One of the critics who came to the show yesterday was Lesya Orlova, from the Ukrainian newspaper Segodaya. She said: “It is a pity. We have a lot of talented artists, a lot of interesting artists and a lot of original artists.” For Mr Doroshenko, however, art has no geographical borders. Two years ago a similar dispute broke out over a decision by the Welsh to have a Frenchman, Paul Granjon, among artists representing them at the Bi-ennale.

This year Cyprus is showing Mustafa Hulusi, a Turkish Cypriot who was born in London, trained there and continues to live there, and Emin is of Turkish origin.

Taylor-Wood, who is married to Jay Jopling – owner of the White Cube gallery, whose artists include Emin and Damien Hirst – is a photographer and film-maker short-listed for the Turner in 1998. Her work focuses on celebrity, sex and her self-image.

Last year Tate Modern premiered her pornographic two-hour film, Destricted, which featured an eight-minute section in which a man masturbated, reigniting the debate about the boundary between art and porn. Earlier pieces have included Killing Time, a video of four people miming an opera.

In the Ukrainian Pavilion, housed in a spectacular Venetian palazzo, Taylor-Wood is presenting three new films. One of them shows a swan decomposing on a girl, apparently inspired by W. B. Yeats’s Leda and the Swan.

Mr Doroshenko said: “Even if it’s serendipity, her work touches on Ukrainian sensibilities and iconography. The swan is important in Ukrainian folklore and songs.”

The other British artist, Titchner, is one of last year’s Turner Prize nominees and has, again, no connection with Ukraine. He did at least visit it for the project and linked up with some local artists there.

His resulting work is a banner that reads: “We are the Ukrainians. What else matters?” While offerings from Dzine, who lives in the Ukrainian neighbourhood in Chicago, include a fibreglass boat, Bratkov, Mikhailov and Teller have produced photographic work. Hnilitsky and Zaiats, his wife, offer a video installation.

The Biennale is open to the public from Sunday until November 21.

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