THE CENSORSHIP OF MOURNING: SOUTH AFRICA AND THE 2026 VENICE BIENNALE

If elegies are silenced, how can absent voices sing? Earlier this month, on January 2, South Africa’s Minister of Sports, Arts and Culture, Gayton McKenzie, decided to withdraw Gabrielle Goliath’s project from the 2026 Venice Art Biennale. The work slated for presentation, Elegy (2015–), was described by the minister as “highly divisive in nature and relates to an ongoing international conflict that is widely polarizing,” according to the South African outlet Daily Maverick.

Goliath was unanimously selected by an independent panel to represent South Africa at the prestigious Biennale. Her series, which began in 2015 and remains ongoing, addresses femicide, the murder of members of the LGBTQ+ community in South Africa, and the twentieth-century massacre of the Herero and Nama peoples perpetrated by German colonial forces in what is now Namibia. The video performance was also set to include, in 2026, a tribute to Palestinian poet Hiba Abu Nada, who was killed in Gaza in 2023 along with her son during an Israeli airstrike.

The artist’s work, in her own words, “is not about violence, but rather prioritizes practices of mourning, survival, and repair, within and despite this normative disregard,” as she told Daily Maverick. She emphasizes that her work is about life, not death—“a Black feminist decolonial project of care and radical love.”

McKenzie, framing Elegy as a polarizing work due to its references to Gaza, had requested modifications specifically to the section addressing the issue. Goliath and the curatorial team—Ingrid Masondo and James Macdonald—considered this a “violation of the right to freedom of expression.” The subsequent withdrawal of the project was described by the South African Pavilion’s selection committee as an “abuse of executive authority,” and the committee publicly declared its “continued and unequivocal support” for Goliath and the pavilion’s curator.

In December 2023, South Africa initiated proceedings against Israel at the International Court of Justice, accusing it of genocide in the Gaza Strip. Even so, its own government censored a tribute to Gazan victims.

McKenzie, the Minister of Culture, argued that the pavilion should present “the best of South Africa to the world.” Elegy brought together multiple voices, multiple mourners, multiple testimonies—an act of honoring that bears witness and laments, an act of solidarity. What a South African artist observes, what she seeks to repair, what she shares so that we might also repair. When works that narrate are censored, only the official story remains.