Venice’s South Africa Pavilion Will Stay Empty — and Gabrielle Goliath’s Work Has Moved Nearby
The South Africa Pavilion in the Giardini will remain closed for the duration of this year’s Venice Biennale after culture minister Gayton McKenzie canceled a planned project by South African artist Gabrielle Goliath (b. 1983), calling it “highly divisive.” But the work has not disappeared. Visitors can now see it at the 12th-century Chiesa di Sant’Antonin, about half a mile away, where the installation feels, if anything, more pointed in its new setting.
Inside the church, Goliath has installed several filmed versions of Elegy, her ongoing performance series dedicated to victims of atrocities in South Africa and beyond. The series has long addressed femicide, the killings of queer people and women, and the German-led genocide in colonial Namibia in the early 1900s. In Venice, a new edition centers on Gazan poet Hiba Abu Nada, who was killed by an Israeli airstrike in October 2023, and places her memory alongside other murdered Palestinians across five screens at the center of the nave.
The sound is as important as the image. The women’s voices in the work hold a single note, then separate, then merge again, creating a lament that seems to move through the church’s stone acoustics. The setting intensifies the piece’s charge: Black and brown bodies appear beneath the idealized white Christian figures painted in the church’s murals, a juxtaposition that sharpens the work’s argument about whose lives are publicly mourned and whose are not.
Goliath said at the exhibition’s opening on Monday that McKenzie’s letters made the minister’s position explicit. According to the artist, he said the material dealing with South African femicide and the Ovaherero and Nama genocide was acceptable, but the Palestinian section had to be removed. The cancellation, she suggested, is not only about one artwork. It reflects a broader refusal to treat Palestinian life as grievable, even as South Africa has taken Israel to the International Court of Justice over genocide.
Over the past decade, Goliath said, she has been asking a central question: whose lives count, and whose deaths are recognized as worthy of mourning? That question now extends beyond the installation itself. Alongside the Venice presentation, she will launch the Elegy Reader, a published collection of poems responding to Gaza, Namibia, South African femicide, and other conflicts, with a public reading in Venice. In a Biennale shaped by national pavilions and official narratives, Goliath’s relocated work offers a quieter but more unsettling proposition: that the spaces of art can still become sites of public grief, even when governments try to close them off.
