Gabrielle Goliath’s Venice Biennale Work Will Be Shown Off-Site After Pavilion Ban
A performance artwork by South African artist Gabrielle Goliath that was barred from the country’s Venice Biennale pavilion will still be seen in Venice this spring, though outside the Biennale’s main exhibition framework.
Beginning May 4, Goliath’s work commemorating Palestinian poet Hiba Abu Nada will be presented as a video installation at the Chiesa di Sant’Antonin, a church in Venice’s Castello district. The installation is scheduled to run for three months and is being staged in partnership with the London arts center Ibraaz.
The work had been intended for South Africa’s pavilion, but was removed over what organizers described as “highly divisive” content. With no substitute project announced, the pavilion is expected to remain empty.
Goliath has criticized the decision to ban the piece, saying it set “a dangerous precedent.” The project is connected to her ongoing series “Elegy,” which she began in 2015 as a sustained act of mourning following the murder of South African student Ipeleng Christine Moholane. In that body of work, Goliath has repeatedly returned to the ethics of remembrance and the ways institutions frame grief, testimony, and public speech.
The Venice development arrives amid a broader set of art-world updates spanning museum research, cultural funding, and heritage preservation in conflict zones.
At the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in Toronto, researchers say they have identified both the artist and the young Black sitter in an 18th-century portrait acquired by the museum in 2020. The 1775 painting, long a puzzle for specialists, is now believed to depict an enslaved woman known as Eleonora Susette, who was born in the former Dutch colony in what is now Guyana. The museum also attributes the work to Berlin-born painter Jeremias Schultz (1722-1800).
According to the AGO, the breakthrough was prompted by an email from a family in the Netherlands with ties to the artist. Adam Harris Levine, the museum’s associate curator of European art, noted the resonance of the research in Toronto, a city with a large Caribbean community. Levine added that the investigation is continuing and that the museum hopes to share a fuller account as more details are confirmed.
Elsewhere, cultural institutions and heritage sites remain closely entangled with geopolitics. The European Commission and the UK have allocated additional funding to support culture in Ukraine. In France, former Louvre president Laurence des Cars told lawmakers that, following the October theft of France’s crown jewels from the Louvre, the objects should no longer be displayed there.
In New York, the Brooklyn Museum has earmarked $13 million to renovate 6,400 square feet of permanent gallery space dedicated to its African art collection, with completion targeted for 2027.
And in Ukraine, a Bernardine monastery in Lviv — part of a UNESCO world heritage site — was damaged in a Russian drone strike, underscoring the ongoing vulnerability of historic architecture amid the war.
In Syria, a separate model of recovery is taking shape in Aleppo, where a local, diverse, women-led urban restoration mission is rebuilding the city’s historic fabric with an emphasis on lived-in structures. Dr. Mathias Winde, executive director of the German-based Gerda Henkel Foundation, which is supporting the effort, said the project links cultural preservation to livelihoods and community resilience — and insists that reconstruction must be shaped by Syrians themselves.
