1. Writing is a way of loving. To love is to give life, continuity. This is a story about lives that were not meant to go on. But they did go on.
Soon after artist Gabrielle Goliath was informed that her work Elegy was selected to represent South Africa at the 61st Venice Biennale, her gallery—Goodman Gallery in South Africa—terminated its relationship with the artist, citing financial reasons. Then, South African Minister of Sport, Arts, and Culture Gayton McKenzie stepped in and demanded that Goliath cut out a crucial section of the work: the one that pays tribute to Heba Abunada, the thirty-two-year-old Palestinian poet who was killed by an Israeli airstrike in October 2023. When Goliath did not comply, he canceled her work from being exhibited in the country’s pavilion.
Elegy is an artwork that gives us space to grieve. Grieving is reparative work. It is reflective work. It is where we may continue to love and long for what, really, cannot be repaired. Buoyed by the enormous upwelling of support from within South Africa and beyond, Elegy opened as an independent exhibition in Chiesa di Sant’Antonin in the Castello neighborhood of Venice on May 5. Saint Anthony the Abbot, a fourth-century ascetic monk who lived in Egypt’s deserts, was renowned for his ability to intercede on behalf of the faithful and bring about miraculous healing. Many, no doubt, have knelt in the pews of the sanctuary and pleaded, even when the cause seemed lost. It is thus fitting that Chiesa di Sant’Antonin will become, for the duration of three months, Elegy’s home, a beautiful, life-giving, if fleeting gathering space for all of us who have experienced shaming, pushback, silencing, defunding, and social death. To have found a way, “in the face of cancellation, threat, and incommensurable losses,” as Goliath said in a statement, is to “dare to think and dream the world differently.”
2. A “sung cry”
Goliath has been working as an artist for close to two decades and is based in Johannesburg since 2017. For each performance of Elegy, she brings together a group of opera singers, who, for the duration of an hour, vocalize a single note. The note is a lament, a funereal hymn that commemorates a specific, named woman or LGBTQIA+ individual whose life ended due to an act of gendered and sexual violence. The single note ebbs and rises as it is vocalized by each performer, with her own tessitura and timbre. As each performer’s voice and breath empties from her, she steps down from a low podium and exits to her right. Another performer steps up behind her, vocalizing the same note. It grows in power as the singer fully faces the audience, sounding out as purely—and for about the same length of time—as a struck tuning fork. Together, the vocalizations are sustained as a “kind of sung cry—evoking the presence of an absent individual,” as Goliath has said of her work. By collectively enacting this ritual of mourning, loss becomes a site for building community, a space for creating empathic, cross-cultural encounters.
In the eleven years since it was first performed, in 2015, Elegy has been exhibited at nineteen locations around the world. Though it began by naming and mourning those from South Africa, it has evolved to commemorate people from elsewhere. Although each iteration of the work stands under the larger “umbrella of Elegy,” each “takes on the name of the individual commemorated … the specificity of a life,” as Goliath said during one of our conversations. She also documents live performances on video “as an archive of mourning,” even if they are not intended for exhibition. Together, the performances and the recordings lend weight—a materiality—to existences that were meant to be expunged from memory.
3. What does it mean to continue?
(Silencing) In the wake of concentrated efforts to prevent the exhibition of this work—composed to commemorate, mourn, and repair—what does it mean to continue? What does it take to keep waking up to sound out the alarm?
Silencing dissent through withdrawing structural and logistical support is a way that institutions demonstrate their power. Harming and silencing ensure that lessons are imprinted on those who dare to voice dissent and demand accountability. It instructs others. These practices are part of the same system that erases lives with bombs.
When I spoke with Goliath and her studio manager, James Macdonald, a few weeks ago, we recalled the other artists and writers we each knew whose vocal support for the lives of Palestinians has left them isolated, abandoned by their support systems. Others who spoke out about systemic racism, or tried to report institutionally protected sexual predators or abusers, saw their friendships fade away. It turns out that even those who loudly perform social justice are wary of losing their access.
I work at an educational institution that cleverly weaponizes incompetence, blaming it on systems that are purposefully nonfunctional in order to avoid dealing with legitimate, even catastrophic, concerns. On top of this, administrators strategically perform care while caroming anyone who reports harm from one office to another. You follow protocol: You speak to the dean about the systematic discrimination and bullying you’ve experienced for twenty years in your department. She insists you don’t file a formal report. Because, she says, human resources does not function. She sends you, instead, to the faculty assembly chair, the Title IX (gender equality) officer, and then a representative at a decorative “diversity” office (all women). You speak with an elected union official (it turns out they are a documented, serial sexual predator). You try to report their conduct to the union’s legal representative, who, though you specifically say you need to speak to them confidentially, immediately calls and informs the sexual predator about your call. The union’s chapter president tells you that there’s nothing he can do, because your campus—your colleagues—elected the person. And anyway, he adds, “This is the only kind of person who wants to do this work, who runs for this kind of office.” Now you’re dealing with both racist colleagues and a sexual predator. You return to the dean, who calls you a “woman of courage” (repeatedly) and wants to send you off to talk to more people. This seemingly absurd game of musical chairs is aimed at ameliorating the complainant and—importantly—exhausting them. As Sara Ahmed states in Complaint!, it is meant to frame the complainant as the problem and dissipate the threat they pose.
This is how silencing works. Scratch the surface of liberal sensibilities and all you will find is reluctance, excuses, and more institutional violence.
(Discomfort) Elegy’s three suites lay bare persistent fallacies about gender-based violence. They do not offer platitudes, the promise of “closure,” or “never again.” Many of us, after all, have lived to learn harder truths.
When it comes to systemic, gender-based violence, the unspoken rule is this: If you must speak of white persons—white male persons, in particular—as responsible, speak of their behavior as extreme—abnormal, extraordinary, a result of mental illness, taking place in a past so distant that any claim of responsibility or reparations may be easily dismissed. But should you speak of white supremacy as intrinsic to historical and ongoing sexual violence, injury, murder, genocide—or of expansionist ventures in which the geopolitical West is entangled in unions that profit from necropolitical capitalism—expect a legion to be deployed to silence you.
Mourning the effects of systemic violence is permitted if it is performative. Without teeth. If the violence is displaced onto othered bodies—an enslaved woman in a long-ago time, killed by her partner (not a white slave owner); a Black or brown woman, killed by a Black or brown man; a trans person, a gender-nonconforming person, again, killed by a Black or brown man—that is acceptable, comfortable, even. We have been colonially trained, over several centuries, to see this as normative. Black and brown persons are rape-able, murderable. Black and brown men, in particular, rape and kill.
Part of the power of Elegy is that it is uncomfortable. The impulse to shut it down arises from recognizing complicity. Privilege refuses responsibility, rejects unease. But discomfort, in the space of such awe-ful recall, presents an opportunity to meditate on the long arc of violence. It calls on audiences to resist the commodification and instrumentalization of one genocide in order to amass enough guilt to justify committing another.
4. A minister, a gallery, and a cancellation
The machinations of the South African minister may appear, from afar, to be all chaos and buffoonery. But as I wrote in an op-ed for Hyperallergic, seemingly chaotic moves by those in power usually mask strategy.
In 2023, South Africa famously led the charge against Israel for committing genocide in Gaza. On December 29, 2023, it filed an application “instituting proceedings against Israel before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) … concerning alleged violations by Israel of its obligations under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (the ‘Genocide Convention’) in relation to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.” To those unfamiliar with South African politics, it must appear contradictory that a minister appointed by the ruling party would work overtime to silence an artwork that appeared to align with country’s public standpoint.
In fact, McKenzie was appointed to this position only because the ruling party, African National Congress (ANC), lost its stronghold and was forced to create an alliance with a right-wing opposition party, the Patriotic Alliance (PA), of which McKenzie is president and cofounder. His position on the ongoing genocide in Gaza veers sharply from that of the ANC, and he has continued to loudly condemn South Africa’s ICJ case against Israel. Like many, McKenzie has learned, in more recent times, to temper his words. But as an avowed Christian Zionist, a sect that believes that the (Christian) messiah will return only if all Jewish people inhabit their biblical homeland of Israel, he continues to espouse a staunchly pro-Israel position. When challenged, he recently said that his support for Israel is rooted in his Christian faith, that the Bible commands his stance, and that he believes that those who bless Israel will also be blessed.
His detractors claim that his position is less a matter of faith than of cash flowing into his—and the Patriotic Alliance’s—coffers. As an unnamed official at the Department of International Relations and Cooperation (Dirco) told the South African newspaper the Daily Maverick, “Minister McKenzie . . . is heavily funded by the Zionists—which we all know.”
This is South Africa’s minister of sport, arts, and culture.
In his ministerial capacity, McKenzie appointed Art Periodic, a nonprofit organization, to manage the selection of an artist (or artists) for the country’s Venice participation. The founding affidavit, submitted by Goliath, Macdonald, and curator Ingrid Masondo to the High Court in Pretoria, shows the following: On December 6, 2025, representatives of Art Periodic emailed Masondo, who would curate the presentation of Goliath’s work, to inform her that Elegy had been selected to represent South Africa at Venice, following a “thorough evaluation process by the Curatorial Selection Committee” and a unanimous vote. A public announcement was scheduled for January 6.
However, at a moment when Goliath and her close supporters should have been celebrating, something surprising happened. Goodman Gallery, which had represented Goliath for ten years, informed the artist, over a December 18 Zoom call, that it would no longer represent her. The decision, relayed by gallery owner and director Liza Essers and senior director and head curator Olivia Leahy, came while a solo show of Goliath’s work was still up at Goodman’s New York location, scheduled to coincide with the showing of her photographic series Berenice and video work Personal Accounts at the Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1, respectively. Goodman’s January 15 public statement attributed its decision to financial reasons (operational restructuring, contraction of the art market), insisting it had been made in November 2025, before Goliath’s selection for the Venice Biennale.
According to Goliath’s affidavit, McKenzie attempted, via an internal letter sent to Art Periodic on December 22, to pressure the artist to remove the section of Elegy that paid tribute to Heba Abunada, because it “relates to an ongoing international conflict that is widely polarising,” adding that he was considering “possible termination of South Africa’s participation in the Pavilion.” In a subsequent letter, dated January 2, he said he was terminating the relationship with Art Periodic, because “it would not be wise nor defensible for South Africa to support an art installation against a country currently accused of genocide while we as South Africa are also fielding unjustified accusations of genocide.” He was referring to Donald Trump’s repeated, spurious claims of “white genocide” in South Africa.
McKenzie canceled Goliath’s participation in the biennale. Goliath and Masondo stood by their refusal to censor their work.
Goliath’s studio manager, Macdonald, said that at first Art Periodic reiterated its commitment to the selection process, but soon thereafter excused itself from further communication. The selection committee that Art Periodic had appointed, however, stepped forward and released a public statement on January 8, standing by its unanimous decision and ongoing commitment to the transparent selection process.
Three weeks later, on January 22, Goliath filed an urgent application at the Gauteng High Court in Pretoria, seeking to have the minister’s decision to cancel her work declared unlawful. When the case was heard on February 11, Goliath and her team hoped that, if Judge Mamoloko Kubushi ruled in their favor, they would still have a chance to represent South Africa at the biennale. But the ruling did not even come until February 18, too late to submit work for the biennale. Moreover, the judge dismissed Goliath’s application and ordered that costs be awarded to the respondents, including costs of senior and junior counsel. Again, in what seemed to be an inexplicable move, the judge documented no reasons for her decision. (Reasons made public on February 22, after requests from Goliath’s legal team, oddly cited a ruling on contract law.) By ordering the plaintiffs to pay for costs, Kubushi conveyed a punitive message: Oppose a powerful minister and face dire consequences.
The censorship Goliath experienced at the hand of the state has terrifying implications for all South Africans. Her team said they plan to appeal, even if they have to take the case to the highest court in the country, the Constitutional Court of South Africa. Goliath added that she feels enormous gratitude for her legal team—which includes Adila Hassim, a member of the team that brought South Africa’s case to the ICJ—and its continued commitment to represent her pro bono.
5. Elegy — three suites in harmony
Goliath chose the single note that performers hold in each performance of Elegy with care. She explained to me how, through her research, she found that nearly all female opera singers, from soprano to contralto, are able to hold B-natural. The note’s accessibility to a range of opera singers made it ideal for Elegy. As Goliath said, “What is important is not any symbolic or referential aspect to the note, but rather its melodic irresolution, non-narrative form, and the duration and repetition by which it is sustained.” When grief and loss cannot be communicated or represented, we sing-cry what cannot be resolved. What cannot be held in leaks out.
Recognizing individuality offers an antidote to erasure, a refusal of the totalizing annihilation processes of genocide. For this reason, each iteration of Elegy is dedicated to specific, named individuals wherever possible, so that we mourn and recall them. Elegy has commemorated historical individuals, such as Louisa van de Caab (2018) and Cornelia van Piloane (2019), two enslaved women who lived in the Western Cape in the 18th century. More often, however, the performances commemorate contemporaries whose lives were taken through patriarchal and imperial violence.
The variation of Elegy exhibited at Chiesa di Sant’Antonin in Venice this year consists of three suites, produced over a two-year period. Eight freestanding monolith screen structures, each over two meters tall, stand in portrait orientation, organically encircling the central space of the church. On seven of the screens, a different female performer appears out of a velvet-dark background and steps onto a dais. Each performer emanates a single, clear note, holding it for as long as she is capable. The vocalizations emanating from each screen resonate as a chorus, inviting an immersive, “somatic and relational” interactions, as Macdonald told me. On the eighth screen, the illuminated dais remains unoccupied to commemorate the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Walking into the sanctuary, I felt an immediate shift in my body. Choral resonance, amplified by the church’s interior, transferred an urgency. Everything was still; everything was reverberating. It is an alarm that alerts—and awakens. You cannot go back to sleep.
In the first suite, the note vocalized by each singer recalls Ipeleng Christine Moholane, the 19-year-old journalism student who was raped, murdered, and left in a field in Tembisa. It was Moholane who the very first performance of Elegy honored, in 2015. A commemorative text scripted by Ipeleng’s father, Isaac Moholane, will be illuminated on the wall.
The second, Elegy—for two ancestors, honours two Nama women ancestors whose names remain unrecorded in the colonial archive. Both were displaced and killed in the genocide of Ovaherero and Nama people in Namibia by German forces during the early 1900s—the first recorded genocide of the 20th century. Turning to the disavowed—and, till recently, suppressed—history of the Ovaherero and Nama genocide was, for Goliath, a way of addressing colonial practices of dispossession and erasure, and how we continue to live in the wake of that originary violence. The remainders of that history also inform the ways in which we regard certain bodies as valuable (impossible to harm without repercussion) and others as disposable. Or, as the scholar Pumla Dineo Gqola has written, this history means that certain bodies—Black and brown feminized bodies—are read as “unrapable.” That is, seen as available for sexual assault and murder without recourse.
The third suite commemorates Heba Abunada, who was killed, along with her young son, in an Israeli airstrike in Khan Yunis in October 2023, in honor of whom Goliath also commissioned the South African poet Maneo Mohale to script a ghazal, recalling the poem, “I grant you refuge,” which the Palestinian poet had written just ten days before she was killed.
The three suites allowed Goliath to “draw meaningful connections between colonial dispossession and genocide in Namibia, rape culture and femicide in South Africa, and the orchestrated displacement and killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza,” she said. It offered her a way to ask, “How it is that some lives remain grievable, whilst others are rendered available to violence, death, and disavowal?”
A censored version of Elegy—one that did not refer to Gaza as a present-day site of settler-colonial violence and genocide—would have reinforced a colonial myth: Systematic sexual violence is either a thing of the past or something barbaric men in distant lands do. But as a whole, the three suites cross generations and geographies, connecting Elegy performances commemorating enslaved women killed in the Cape to present-day epidemics of gender-based violence and genocides. The shroud drawn over Ipeleng Christine Moholane, our unnamed Indigenous ancestors, and Heba Abunada is cut from the same cloth. It covers tens of thousands of loved ones: our students, sisters, mothers, and friends.
6. Eleven minutes
I read Maneo Mohale’s experimental ghazal at 6:45 a.m. my time, six hours after they emailed it to me. I was still in bed, just waking up, winter blankets tucked around me. Mohale’s words moved from one sky to another—above Al-Fashir, Kashmir, Goma, between the bright white of their highveld sky and my gray cloudcarpet that concealed the sun.
The ghazal, titled “The Second City (for Heba Abunada),” incorporates a diary entry by Abunada. On the page, Abunada’s words, written on October 15, 2023, at 8:47 p.m., sit on the top right corner. They follow you. Or your eyes follow them. How could eyes escape such words?
We are above, building a second city,
doctors without patients or blood,
professors without overcrowding and yelling at students,
new families without pain or sadness, journalists photographing paradise,
and poets writing about eternal love, all of them from Gaza, all of them.
In heaven, a new Gaza – unbesieged – is coming into being.
Mohale’s words, below, attend to Abunada’s. They try to picture the second city of which she speaks. The city that is without—patients or blood, pain or sadness, screams. I cannot yet imagine this paradise, one that is not occupied, besieged, a city by the sea that others’ desirous eyes are not trying to settle. But Mohale’s words keep both cities Abunada writes about in our sight lines, holding two things—reality, life as we know it (impossible as it is to believe), and hope (an even more difficult practice)—at once. How to commit to the uncertainty principle, the implausibility of superposition? Is it possible for a city of people to be simultaneously alive and dead, as long as it remains unobserved?
Mohale’s words then move
… towards Gaza whose breadth
would span the distance from Braamfontein to Rosebank
if Gaza was Johannesburg—which it’s not.
That stanza stopped me. I don’t know how to say why. Something to do with the expansiveness of empathy, the way our hearts fill when we long for justice, but also mourn, knowing the limits of solidarity. We reach for equivalences: The distance between Braamfontein and Rosebank is just eleven minutes by car. But Johannesburg—and apartheid violence, which this city knows so well—is not the flattened devastation that is Gaza.
7. Miraculous interventions
When one’s nation, powerful institutions, and individuals seek to obliterate your voice, what else to do but seek refuge outside, build frameworks that make life—memory, rage, grieving—possible? If the logics of genocide perforate national borders, shouldn’t acts of witness, mourning, and repair also be unbounded?
We should know, by now, that the nation state is not the thing it purports to be. Our nations provide support structures selectively. They may just as easily take them away as give them. They often instrumentalize our voices. (They don’t elevate us for no reason.) They can kill us. The same might be said for institutions that supposedly champion our powerful voices—especially those that make great show of support as long as we remain agreeable, available supplicants.
It took extraordinary, communal effort to bring Elegy to Venice, outside the formal sites allocated to the biennale. Alongside the Bertha Foundation and Ibraaz, the list of those who generously supported the work’s continuation includes the family trust of legendary South African photographer David Goldblatt, descendant of Lithuanian Jews, and Khaled Sabsabi and Michael Dagostino, the artist and curator team who were chosen for the Australian Pavilion, abruptly dropped, and then reinstated.
At Chiesa di Sant’Antonin—a building meant for refuge, for miraculous interventions—Elegy will create an invocation, an acknowledgment of the absent-presence of beloved women. It will invite audiences to participate in reparative work.
We will gather, even as we recognize that repair is imperfect; that repair leaves seams (to keep us from forgetting); that it leaves tenderness (sites of repair crackle and twinge); that it may reduce our capacity, or result in dysfunction, making things that were once easy, harder. Even if some repair may not be possible, we are called to be present for this intergenerational work.
This work will break some of our bodies. It will break our hearts. We go on.
