Gabrielle Goliath Will Stage “Elegy” Independently in Venice After South Africa Cancels Biennale Pavilion Plans
South Africa’s pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale is set to stand empty, but the project that was meant to fill it will still be seen in the city. South African artist Gabrielle Goliath will present an independent iteration of her long-running work “Elegy” at Chiesa di Sant’Antonin in Castello from May 5 to July 31, after the country’s sports, arts and culture minister, Gayton McKenzie, cancelled the official pavilion presentation in January.
Goliath was selected last year to represent South Africa with a new version of “Elegy,” a decade-long project that has centered on femicide and the murder of LGBTQI+ people in South Africa. The 2026 iteration expands the work’s scope to address the Ovaherero and Nama genocide in Namibia in the early 20th century, and the death of Hiba Abu Nada, a Palestinian poet killed in an Israeli airstrike in October 2023.
McKenzie, the leader of the right-wing Patriotic Alliance party, objected to the Abu Nada-related suite. In a letter to the Biennale organizing committee in December, he described that section as “highly divisive in nature” and called for it to be altered. When Goliath refused, he withdrew the pavilion plans.
Announcing the independent Venice presentation this week, Goliath described the decision as emotionally complicated. “There has been something liberating about this independent intervention, although I do, of course, feel the gravity of this cancellation,” she said. She added that the empty pavilion reads to her as “a marker of gross disavowal,” linking the decision to broader patterns of “systemic disregard” and “orchestrated erasure of Black, brown femme and queer lives — in Gaza, Namibia, South Africa.”
South Africa’s Department of Sports, Arts and Culture did not respond to a request for comment.
The cancellation has also moved into the courts. In February, Goliath and the curator Ingrid Masondo filed an urgent application with the High Court in Pretoria seeking to overturn McKenzie’s decision. The court dismissed the application, a ruling that many in South Africa’s art community have viewed as a significant setback for artistic freedom of expression.
“The ruling was a shock and disappointment — not only to me, but to many who have been following the case and sense its broader implications for the South African arts community and beyond,” Goliath said.
Her legal team has appealed the decision and is awaiting a hearing date from the judge, Mamoloko Kubushi. McKenzie has filed a notice indicating he will oppose the application to appeal.
Goliath said the legal fight continues even as the work finds a new venue in Venice because of what she sees as the precedent at stake. “The political stakes are urgent. We really cannot allow this cancellation to set a precedent, to normalise ministerial abuses of power and state interference in creative expression,” she said. “It’s a constitutional question, of course, but it goes further than that — it cuts deeper. What does it mean when we are told who we may or may not mourn, whose lives we may or may not value, what kind of world we may or may not imagine?”
Asked what she would say to McKenzie if given the chance, Goliath replied: “Blessed are those who mourn.”
Beyond Venice, “Elegy” is also scheduled to be shown at Ibraaz in London in October, supported by the Bertha Foundation. In a statement, Ibraaz founder and director Lina Lazaar said the presentation aligns with the organization’s mission to provide “a brave space that platforms art and ideas from the Global Majority.”
For Goliath, the work’s continuation is inseparable from the collective labor of grief and witness that “Elegy” asks of its audiences. She said she is “deeply grateful to those who have gathered around me and the work in this moment,” adding that what has sustained her is “the imperative of this work — this call to mourn.”
