[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Gabrielle-Goliath_photo-by-Anthea-Pokroy_2-landscape.png?w=1024″]<\/p>\n
\n\tSouth Africa\u2019s contribution to this year\u2019s Venice Biennale will be both absent and impossible to ignore. Months after the government abruptly canceled a planned pavilion by artist Gabrielle Goliath, the work at the center of the dispute is now set to appear in Venice anyway, just not inside the Biennale proper. <\/p>\n
\n\tInstead, according to\u00a0The Guardian,\u00a0<\/em>Goliath\u2019s\u00a0Elegy<\/em>\u00a0will be installed nearby at the Chiesa di Sant\u2019Antonin, where it will run for three months beginning in May.\u00a0 The official South African pavilion, meanwhile, will sit empty.<\/p>\n \n\tThe unusual arrangement caps a controversy that has been simmering since January, when that country\u2019s culture minister Gayton McKenzie\u00a0pulled the plug\u00a0on Goliath\u2019s presentation just days before the Biennale deadline. The work, part of her long-running\u00a0Elegy<\/em>\u00a0series, was deemed \u201chighly divisive\u201d by the ministry because it included references to Palestinians killed in Gaza, including a tribute to poet Hiba Abu Nada, who died in an Israeli airstrike in 2023.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tGoliath has pushed back with force, arguing that the issue was not the content itself but the refusal to alter it. The cancellation, she said, set \u201ca dangerous precedent,\u201d particularly given that\u00a0Elegy<\/em>\u00a0is rooted in mourning victims of racialized and gendered violence across geographies, from South Africa to Namibia to Gaza.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tThe fallout was immediate. Goliath and curator Ingrid Masondo challenged the decision in court, framing it as a violation of artistic freedom, but their case was dismissed in mid-February.\u00a0South Africa ultimately declined to name a replacement,\u00a0opting instead to withdraw\u00a0from the exhibition entirely, leaving its pavilion vacant.<\/p>\n \n\tWhat remains is a split-screen version of national representation. Inside the Biennale, nothing. And just outside it, a work that has already become one of the most talked-about absences of the exhibition.<\/p>\n \n\tThe \u201cElegy\u201d series itself is restrained: In its video form, seven singers emerge one by one from darkness, each holding a single sustained note before giving way to the next. The effect is meant to mimic the slow accumulation of grief.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tAs ARTnews<\/em>\u2018s Alex Greenberger wrote in January, the new \u201cElegy\u201d work \u201cwas set to explore the killings of women and queer people in South Africa, as well as the killings of women in Namibia by German forces during a genocide in the early 20th century, but it was one section in particular that reportedly raised concern at the culture ministry. That section was to feature words by the Palestinian poet Hiba Abu Nada, who was killed, along with her son, during an Israeli airstrike in October 2023.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tFor supporters, the episode reads as a clear case of political interference in an independent curatorial process. For the government, it reflects a line drawn around what a national pavilion should represent, and how far it should wade into ongoing geopolitical conflict.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/news\/south-africa-venice-biennale-gabrielle-goliath-banned-work-exhibition-1234778846\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Gabrielle-Goliath_photo-by-Anthea-Pokroy_2-landscape.png?w=1024″] South Africa\u2019s contribution to this year\u2019s Venice Biennale will be both absent and impossible to ignore. Months after the government abruptly canceled a planned pavilion by artist Gabrielle Goliath, the work at the center of the dispute is now set to appear in Venice anyway, just not inside the Biennale proper. Instead, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1849352","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1849352","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1849352"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1849352\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1849352"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1849352"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1849352"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}