• Gabrielle Goliath’s Elegy will open in Venice after being canceled from South Africa’s Biennale pavilion.
• The show was scrapped by South Africa’s culture minister over references to Gaza, sparking backlash and a failed legal challenge.
• It will now run independently at a Venice church during Biennale week.

A “highly divisive” exhibition that was originally planned for South Africa’s pavilion at the Venice Biennale, before it was canceled in January, will go ahead in an alternative location.

Artist Gabrielle Goliath‘s performance project Elegy will take place at Venice’s Chiesa di Sant’Antonin while the South Africa pavilion in the Arsenale sits empty. The exhibition is being staged independently after South Africa’s High Court denied the artist’s attempt to overturn the culture minister’s cancelation of the show. Goliath and her curator Ingrid Masondo decried the judge’s ruling as a “dangerous precedent, jeopardizing the rights of artists, curators, and creatives in South Africa to freedom of expression–freedom to dissent.”

The exhibition, chosen by the government-appointed nonprofit Art Periodic to represent South Africa at this year’s 61st Biennale, had been abruptly canceled in January by South Africa’s culture minister Gayton McKenzie over content relating to Israel’s war in Gaza.

“In the face of cancelation, threat, and incommensurable losses, [we] dare to think and dream the world differently,” Goliath said in a statement.

Gabrielle Goliath, Elegy (2015–present) at Verbo Performance Art Festival. Photo: James Macdonald.

Elegy, an ongoing performance work that the artist has been iterating on and exhibiting since 2015, commemorates the unjust killing of various groups, including women and queer people in South Africa, and victims of atrocities like the Herero and Nama genocide of the early 1900s. For its debut in Venice, Goliath has updated the work to commemorate the death of Palestinian poet Hiba Abu Nada in an Israeli airstrike in October 2023—the addition that led culture minister Mckenzie to label the work as “divisive.”

The politician has long been open about his support for Israel, breaking with the official stance of South Africa’s government, which supports Palestine. His decision to cancel the exhibition was met with a wave of backlash from South Africa’s arts community as well as international NGOs.

Presented as a video installation across eight screen “monoliths”, Elegy opens to the public on May 5, during the Biennale’s vernissage week, and will remain on view for three months, until July 31. The venue is in Venice’s Castello neighborhood, in close proximity to the Arsenale.

This independent exhibition of Goliath’s work has been realized thanks to support from the South Africa’s Bertha Foundation and Ibraaz, a recently-established London-based charity supporting art from the Global Majority. Elegy will later go on view at Ibraaz in October, around Frieze London.

“Elegy is a work that holds memory, care and connection in the face of loss,” Lina Lazaar, the founder and director of Ibraaz, said. “Carrying it forward now feels both urgent and necessary.”