In a year framed as the most African edition in the Venice Biennale’s history, the continent’s most institutionally developed art economy is represented by nothing at all. South Africa’s space in the Arsenale stands empty — the country’s first absence from the exhibition since 2011.
It is not an oversight or a funding failure. It is the outcome of a fourteen-month dispute involving a government minister, a high court, an artist who refused to alter her work, and a segment of a video installation concerning a poet killed in Gaza.
What Was Meant to Be There
In December 2025 an independent committee unanimously selected the artist Gabrielle Goliath and the curator Ingrid Masondo to represent South Africa.
Their proposal was a new iteration of Elegy, a video-based project Goliath has developed since 2015. Its subject throughout has been mourning: femicide in South Africa, and the murder of LGBTQI+ people. The work takes the form of a held note, sung by a chorus, sustained for the duration — a structure that refuses narrative resolution in favour of duration and presence.
The Venice version extended that frame outward. It addressed the Ovaherero and Nama genocide committed in Namibia in the early twentieth century, and it included a suite dedicated to Hiba Abu Nada, the Palestinian poet killed in an Israeli airstrike in October 2023.
It was that last element that ended the pavilion.
The Minister’s Position
Gayton McKenzie, South Africa’s Minister of Sport, Arts and Culture and leader of the right-wing Patriotic Alliance, cancelled the project on 2 January 2026 after Goliath declined to make the changes he requested.
His stated grounds were that the work was polarising and highly divisive, and that it related to an ongoing international conflict on which opinion is sharply split. When the matter reached court, his representatives argued the case on contractual rather than constitutional territory: the minister, they said, was exercising authority he held over the commission, not adjudicating anyone’s speech.
McKenzie has been publicly supportive of Israel in recent years, a fact reported alongside the decision by most outlets covering it. South Africa’s government has separately been among the most prominent international critics of Israel’s conduct in Gaza, which makes the ministerial intervention harder to read as straightforward state policy and easier to read as an individual one.
The Artist’s Position
Goliath and Masondo argued that the minister lacked the contractual authority to override a selection made by an independent committee, and that the cancellation infringed the constitutional right to freedom of expression.
On 18 February, hours before the Biennale’s deadline for final submissions, Judge Mamokolo Kubushi of the North Gauteng High Court dismissed the application. No reasons were given for the ruling, and costs were awarded against the applicants. Goliath announced an appeal, arguing that the judgment sets a precedent with consequences reaching well beyond her own case.
Of the decision to leave the space vacant rather than fill it, Goliath said the pavilion would stand as a space of erasure, cancellation, censure
.
The Replacement That Never Happened
The detail that has drawn least attention is arguably the most revealing. After cancelling the commission, the department restarted its planning privately and approached at least one alternative team — a thirty-artist Cape Town collective called Beyond the Frames, whose spokesperson Hannes Koekemoer confirmed in January that talks were under way.
Those talks went nowhere. The collective was subsequently informed that the department had decided not to proceed with the Biennale at all. On 20 February the ministry confirmed there would be no state-backed South African exhibition in Venice this year.
So the sequence was not a principled withdrawal. It was a cancellation, followed by an attempt to find a less troublesome replacement, followed by the abandonment of that attempt with the deadline gone.
Elegy Was Shown in Venice Anyway
Goliath took the work to Venice regardless. Elegy opened on 5 May 2026 at the Chiesa di Sant’Antonin in Castello — a fourth-century foundation a short walk from the Arsenale — and ran independently of the Biennale until 31 July.
It has therefore now closed, which is worth knowing if you are travelling to Venice for the Biennale’s remaining months. The work moves to Ibraaz in London from October 2026.
Goliath described the exhibition as a gathering space and a sacred chamber, a reparative work of loving and longing in which a black femme chorus holds a note and, in the face of cancellation and loss, dares to imagine the world otherwise.
What the Absence Means
The contrast this year is difficult to avoid. Five African countries are presenting national pavilions at Venice for the first time — Guinea, Equatorial Guinea, Sierra Leone, Somalia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo — several of them assembling the commissioner, budget, freight and six-month Venetian lease that a pavilion requires with far thinner institutional support than South Africa commands.
South Africa has Zeitz MOCAA and the Norval Foundation, a functioning commercial gallery system, an art fair, and a curatorial class with genuine international standing. It arrived at Venice with none of it.
Whatever view one takes of the underlying dispute — and reasonable people hold sharply different ones about both the work and the minister’s authority — the structural lesson is uncomfortable and worth stating plainly. Institutional capacity is not a ratchet that only turns forward. A country can possess every ingredient required to be present on the international stage and still not be there, because presence depends on governance as much as on infrastructure, and governance can be withdrawn in an afternoon.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is the South African pavilion empty at the Venice Biennale 2026?
The Minister of Sport, Arts and Culture cancelled the selected project in January 2026. A legal challenge failed in February, and the department confirmed on 20 February that no state-backed exhibition would be presented.
What was Gabrielle Goliath’s Elegy about?
A video-based project running since 2015 on mourning — femicide and the murder of LGBTQI+ people in South Africa. The Venice iteration also addressed the Ovaherero and Nama genocide in Namibia and the death of the Palestinian poet Hiba Abu Nada.
Who cancelled the South African pavilion?
Gayton McKenzie, Minister of Sport, Arts and Culture and leader of the Patriotic Alliance, on 2 January 2026, after the artist declined to alter the work.
Can I still see Elegy in Venice?
No. It ran at the Chiesa di Sant’Antonin from 5 May to 31 July 2026 and has closed. It travels to Ibraaz in London from October 2026.
When did South Africa last miss the Venice Biennale?
2011. This is the country’s first absence in fifteen years.
Further reading: the full guide to In Minor Keys, the African pavilions at Venice 2026, and Somalia’s contested debut.
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