South Africa: What the Gabrielle Goliath Case Has Meant for SA's Art World

By Charles Leonard

Minister of Sport, Arts and Culture Gayton McKenzie's censorship of Gabrielle Goliath's video-based project Elegy at the Venice Biennale sent shock waves through the art world, and its reverberations are still being felt. Goliath and the Campaign for Free Expression recently won leave to appeal the February court decision not to overturn McKenzie's decision to remove the exhibit.

It was a Sunday afternoon in early January when I asked Gabrielle Goliath, the artist selected to represent South Africa at this year's prestigious Venice Biennale, what she would say to Gayton McKenzie, if given a chance

The right-wing sport, arts and culture minister had just informed the pavilion's organising committee of his decision to censor Goliath's three-part, video-based project Elegy, just eight days before the 10 January deadline for countries to submit their Biennale plans.

"I would appeal to him to open himself up to the work, to actually experience it," she said. "Because he hasn't seen it."

Goliath and the curator Ingrid Masondo were to present a new iteration of Elegy - a project begun in 2015 that has centred on femicide and the murder of LGBTQI+ people in South Africa. The version planned for the Venice Biennale also addressed violence against women in Namibia and Gaza, and it was the new Gaza-related section that caused the controversy.

On 22 December, the staunchly pro-Israel McKenzie wrote a letter to the organising committee describing the Gaza-related suite, which focused on the death of Heba Abu Nada, a Palestinian poet who was killed in an Israeli airstrike in October 2023,...

Read the full story on Daily Maverick.

Copyright © 2026 Daily Maverick. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections — or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.