Gabrielle Goliath’s cancelled South Africa pavilion project is being shown in Venice after all.
Elegy, the artist’s long-running video and sound installation, is now being presented independently at Chiesa di Sant’Antonin in Castello, a short walk from the Venice Biennale’s Arsenale, after South Africa’s official pavilion was cancelled following a dispute over the work’s inclusion of a Palestinian poet killed in Gaza.
The exhibition opened on Tuesday and runs until July 31. It is supported by the Bertha Foundation and realised in partnership with Ibraaz, Fondazione ICA Milano, Galleria Raffaella Cortese and the Friends of Elegy committee.
Lina Lazaar, founder of Ibraaz and vice president of the Kamel Lazaar Foundation, became involved after the cancellation. Supporters looked for a way to bring the work to Venice outside the official pavilion structure.
"Artists, writers, academics and institutions rallied behind the work, and two main foundations – the Bertha Foundation and the Kamel Lazaar Foundation – decided to allow it to exist here in Venice, in a different location, as a non-formal South African pavilion,” Lazaar tells The National.
Ibraaz began in 2011 as a platform for visual culture from the Middle East and North Africa. It has since been relaunched in London as a cultural institution and publishing platform focused on art, culture and ideas from the global majority.
Goliath had been selected to represent South Africa at the 61st Venice Biennale with Elegy, a work she has been developing for more than a decade. The project, which began in 2015, has previously been staged in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Sao Paulo, Paris, Amsterdam, Munich, Basel and elsewhere, and uses sustained song and collective breath as a form of mourning.
The Venice presentation includes three new suites of performances. They commemorate South African student Ipeleng Christine Moholane, two murdered Nama women ancestors and Heba Abunada, a Palestinian poet killed in an Israeli air strike in Khan Yunis, Gaza, in October 2023.
The installation is presented across eight video screen monoliths inside the church.
The dispute around the South African pavilion began after Gayton McKenzie, the country’s minister of sport, arts and culture, objected to the work’s inclusion of the Palestinian section. The conflict centred on whether Goliath would change the work selected for the pavilion.
“She was asked to remove that single voice,” Lazaar says. “Gabrielle, being incredibly ethically and morally clear about where she stands, refused to edit the work, and therefore the pavilion was cancelled.”
Goliath challenged the decision in court, but the case was dismissed shortly before the Biennale submission deadline. South Africa’s culture ministry later confirmed that there would be no government-backed exhibition at this year’s Biennale, leaving the country’s pavilion empty.
The independent presentation became one of the more visible stories of the Biennale’s opening week.
“We realise that this was probably a blessing in disguise, because the amount of attention, the amount of emotion that this work is gathering is totally unprecedented,” she says. “I think it could have probably been lost here in the Arsenale, had it been where it was intended to be.”
The exhibition also includes the Elegy Reader, a publication of 50 poems drawn from places marked by violence and rupture, including Palestine, South Africa, Sudan, Yemen, Iran and Lebanon.
The reader was launched on Thursday outside the Chiesa di Sant’Antonin, where artists, cultural workers and visitors read aloud for two hours rather than gather for a conventional opening reception.
“The idea of having a traditional cocktail reception didn’t really fit the content or the tone of the work,” Lazaar says. “We decided to organise this collective breathing moment that happened through poetry reading.”
More than 170 readers took part. Lazaar describes the event as “a silent protest” and an act of mourning.
“People were really very touched by this small, simple and important gesture,” she says. “In fact, we could have gone for another hour. We had to really stop it at 7pm sharp.”
The Venice presentation is not expected to be the end of the project. After Venice, Elegy is expected to travel to Ibraaz in London in October, where Lazaar says it will form part of the organisation’s Frieze week programme, before going to ICA Milano in January. Lazaar says the work is also likely to come to the Gulf.
“Gabrielle Goliath’s Elegy will be part of our big Frieze moment in October,” she says. “It’s most likely going to Sharjah next year, and to multiple places. It seems that by trying to silence this pavilion, it has really, if anything, amplified its voice and allowed it to exist in several locations all at once.”
Palestine has been central to the early days of this year’s Venice Biennale. Demonstrations have taken place across the city throughout the preview week, culminating on Friday in a 24-hour strike that left several national pavilions closed and drew a large-scale protest through Venice to the entrance of the exhibition.
Lazaar says the work’s proximity to the pavilion it was meant to occupy amidst these actions sharpened the point of its independent presentation.
“With all powerful works, they will find their way,” she says. “They will find a way to exist in the way they’re intended to – in a way that’s both dignified and gracious.”
Gabrielle Goliath's Elegy is on display in Venice until July 31
