The Artist: Gabrielle Goliath Refuses to Stay Silent

When the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia opens to press next week, the South Africa Pavilion will stand empty. 

Its abandonment follows the cancellation of Gabrielle Goliath’s multi-channel, open-sound video installation Elegy, presented since 2015 and memorialising such atrocities as rape culture and femicide in South Africa, and the Namibian genocide. It comprises recordings of female performers holding a single sustained note of sound, with new singers stepping in to replace them as their breath falters. The installation is displayed on seven screens in an arc formation, suggesting classical theatre or an ecclesiastical chorus. 

The addition to the work that sparked the Pavilion’s cancellation is a segment devoted to the death of the Palestinian poet Hiba Abu Nada in an Israeli airstrike in October 2023. This January, the country’s pro-Israel culture minister Gayton McKenzie requested a change in artistic direction due to the “divisive” nature of the new section. This was rejected by Goliath and her team, and support was subsequently withdrawn.

Gabrielle Goliath. Photo: Anthea Pokroy © the artist

In defiance of this censorship, Goliath will present the work independently at Venice’s Chiesa di Sant’Antonin, realised in partnership with the London-based Global Majority cultural space Ibraaz and enabled by the support of the Bertha Foundation.

Goliath tells The Art Journal that,“When the minister cancelled Elegy, he was saying: ‘You will not mourn these lives’.” McKenzie belongs to South Africa’s Patriotic Alliance, a political party which stands in opposition with the official stance of its country’s government, whose support of an independent Palestinian state has been longstanding.

“What’s happened is also chilling because of the proximity ​​to the kind of censorship that would happen during apartheid in this country,” Goliath continues. When McKenzie’s decision was announced, the arts community rallied in disapproval, and the South Africa Pavilion’s selection committee condemned his actions in an open letter.

“When the cancellation was made final, I received an extraordinary message from Lina Lazaar, the director of Ibraaz,” Goliath says. “She said: ‘Ibraaz is your home’. Björn Geldhof, the director of the Pinchuk Art Center, was also one of the first people I turned to. Yet there are so many that have not had this support – censorship happens everyday, in both quotidian and spectacular ways.” 

Goliath has also been supported by a legal team who worked quickly to appeal McKenzie’s decision. Their effort was ultimately dismissed by a High Court judge, who – in a peculiar turn – also requested that Goliath and her team pay court costs to the claim’s respondents, including McKenzie himself. Goliath’s lawyers are currently challenging this ruling, a process which, she says, could take years.

When asked her feelings about the now-empty South Africa Pavilion, Goliath expresses mixed emotions. “While it is devastating that the Pavilion is now bereft of Elegy, and the reparative sonic work that it seeks to enact, an empty pavilion is a reminder of what happens when nefarious ministerial interference intervenes. It marks the thunderous silence of this canceled and censored space.” 

If anything is to be learnt from the events which have unfolded, it is that the influence of political ambition on artistic integrity is not an isolated incident. Nor is the inescapability of global conflict on culture. “The biennale is not separate and apart from an exceptionally fraught moment that we're all living through,” Goliath says. 

Gabrielle Goliath, Elegy - for a poet, 2026, performance, Homecoming Centre, District Six. Photo: Zunis © the artist

This year’s Biennale di Venezia has been preceded by controversy surrounding the reopening of the Russia Pavilion, sparking criticism including from Italy’s culture ministry, who declared that they opposed the decision. The Pavilion had been closed since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. In response to the backlash, the biennale released a statement saying that the exhibition was “an open institution” that “rejects any form of exclusion or censorship of art”.

In addition, the return of the Israel Pavilion, two years after its closure due to protests, has provoked widespread criticism. The Israeli government has reportedly added a clause to its contracts requiring artists’ work to be presented regardless of protests and boycotts. Last month, almost 200 artists, curators and art workers signed an open letter helmed by the Art Not Genocide Alliance (ANGA) group, calling for Israel’s exclusion from the event. 

Though Palestine itself does not have a national pavilion (at present, Italy does not formally recognise it as a sovereign state), it will be subliminally present throughout this year’s biennale. Goliath hopes that the independent presentation of Elegy, untethered from the “freighted site of a national pavilion”, will provide a refuge for those wishing to acknowledge the ongoing conflict, and therefore form its own kind of resistance.

“Sometimes protest can be as tender and beautiful as recalling a name,” Goliath says. “Elegy is a space for radical refuge; for fleeting moments; glimmers of hope; tenuous kinship.”

Gabrielle Goliath’s Elegy will be on view at the Chiesa di Sant’Antonin in Castello, Venice from Tuesday 5 May to Friday 31 July 2026.

Ella Slater is the Assistant Editor of The Art Journal.