The South Africa Pavilion in the Giardini will sit empty for the entirety of this year’s Venice Biennale, the result of a decision by culture minister Gayton McKenzie to cancel a planned pavilion by artist Gabrielle Goliath for being “highly divisive.” But while the building will remain closed, Biennale attendees can see the planned installation just half a mile away at the Chiesa di Sant’Antonin. The show appears stronger for the move.
Inside the 12th-century church, Goliath has arranged several filmed iterations of Elegy, her ongoing performance series honoring victims of atrocities in South Africa and beyond, including killings of queer people and women, as well as the German-led genocide in colonial Namibia in the early 1900s. While the versions of Elegy concerning the South African femicide and the Herero and Nama genocide appear as one- and two-channel works, a new edition mourning the death of Gazan poet Hiba Abu Nada—who was killed by an Israeli airstrike in October 2023—takes center stage. In that work, which is set across five screens at the center of the nave, Abu Nada is memorialized alongside other murdered Palestinians.
The acoustics of the church carry the voices of Goliath’s women as they, one after another, hold a single note as a lament for the dead. Sometimes, the voices fuse into a collective, while at other times they differentiate, with one singer stopping to take a breath as another takes up her lament. The solemnity of the space, and the juxtaposition of Black and brown bodies beneath the idealized white Christian ones in the church’s murals, clarifies the series’s intervention.
While it has been suspected, though not confirmed, that McKenzie canceled the piece because of the Palestine content, Goliath was unequivocal at the exhibition’s opening on Monday.
“If you read the minister’s letters—the first threatening letters I started getting in December—he very explicitly said that the aspect that deals with femicide in South Africa and the Ovaherero and Nama genocide is acceptable,” she told ARTnews. “But you need to remove the aspect that deals with Palestinian life.”
That the exhibition was canceled merely for mourning and commemorating Palestinians—the new piece is barely different from past iterations, aside from its size—speaks to the state of exception around Palestinian life is in public discourse and the art world.
Gabrielle Goliath’s “Elegy” at La Chiesa di Sant’Antonin in Venice.
LUCA MENEGHEL
“Over these ten years, I’ve really been grappling with what is core to the work,” Goliath said. “And what is core to the work is: Whose lives count? Are they apprehendable as life worth loving, worth grieving after?”
In the months since the cancelation in January, Goliath has been thinking deeply about what it means that the femicide was considered “acceptable” content, but not the deaths of Palestinians. “There are so many levels of negation and disavowal taking place when [McKenzie] says, ‘You can do that,’” she said. What she means, she explained, is that the femicide in South Africa—which President Cyril Ramaphosa declared a “national crisis” in November—has been rendered something the government considers itself not responsible for, even as it pays “lip service” to ending it. The ubiquity of “gendered, racialized, and sexualized violence,” she said, has rendered it “permissible.”
And yet Palestinian life appears still too politically charged to mourn, even for South Africa, which famously brought a case against Israel in the International Court of Justice for the crime of genocide. Goliath said her cancelation is not unique; the degree of public support she’s received since, however, is.
“This degree of cancelation and censorship is happening every day, and quietly,” Goliath said. “I was blessed with an outpouring of support—with the rallying of these incredible organizations. Bertha [Foundation] funds the unfundable, and then courageous spaces like Ibraaz in London and ICA Milano are saying, ‘We have a home for you.’ That’s no small thing. It’s quite profound at this moment to step up in that way.”
Also among those who stepped up were the Patriarchate of Venice and Don Gianmatteo Caputo, the Delegate for Cultural Heritage and Ecclesiastical Buildings, who met with Goliath and offered up Sant’Antonin after Björn Geldhof, the director of the PinchukArtCentre in Kyiv, arranged a meeting.
“I was terrified, I’ll admit. But I said to them: it’s really important that you know what happened—the cancelation, what the work is about—and that you’re happy for us to hold that within your space,” Goliath said. “They responded with open hearts.”
On Thursday, Goliath will take Elegy one step further with the launch of the Elegy Reader, a collection to be published by Ibraaz Publishing comprising poets’ responses to the state of Gaza, the Namibian genocide, and South African femicide, as well as atrocities and conflict in Haiti, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Iran, Lebanon, and beyond. Goliath will hold a public reading of the poems, for which anyone in Venice can sign up to read, creating a new collective act of mourning that echoes the work.
“I’ve spoken to so many people who have been rendered so precarious in this moment. They’ve had funding revoked, they’ve lost their jobs, visas revoked,” she said. “I think it’s going to be a very profound gathering, because it’s about asking others to come, to lend their voice, to lend their presence.”
