Gabrielle Goliath to Show Work Banned from Venice Biennale Outside Main Exhibition
1March 26, 2026
Gabrielle Goliath, who was to have to have represented South Africa at the Sixty-FirstVenice Biennalebefore a government official abruptlycanceledher exhibition, will instead show her work outside the event. The latest version of Goliath’sElegyprojectwill be on view at the Chiesa di Sant’Antonin in Venice’s Castello district, near the Biennale’s main exhibition, from May 5 to July 31. The work’s presence there is being sponsored by theBertha Foundationand by the London art spaceIbraaz, which will show the work through October after it leaves Venice. The South African pavilion, meanwhile, will remain vacant for the duration of the Biennale.
“Convened in this exhibition is a gathering space, a sacred chamber in which to sound a reparative work of loving and longing,” said Goliath in a statement. “We hold a note–a black femme chorus–and in the face of cancellation, threat, and incommensurable losses, dare to think and dream the world differently.”
Conceived in 2015, Goliath’s Elegy comprises performance and video, and addresses femicide killings of trans and gay people in South Africa as well as the Herero and Nama massacre conducted by German colonial forces in the 1900s in what is now Namibia. The latest iteration, which will take the form of a video installation, honors Palestinian poet Hiba Abu Nada, who died in an Israeli airstrike in October 2023.
Unanimously selected by an independent committee in December last year to represent her home country at the Biennale, Goliath was to have shown the work in a pavilion curated by Ingrid Masondo. Calling Elegy “highly divisive,” South African Minister of Sport, Arts and Culture Gayton McKenzie, the founder of the right-wing Patriotic Alliance, canceled the pavilion just days before the January 10 deadline for countries to submit their proposals to the Biennale, leaving the nation with no representative. Goliath and Masondo appealed the cancellation in court but were rebuffed.
“Elegy is a work that holds memory, care and connection in the face of loss,” Ibraaz founder and director Lina Lazaar in a statement. “Carrying it forward now feels both urgent and necessary.”