Overview
- Minister Gayton McKenzie says the December 2 cancellation protected the national pavilion from an unnamed state allegedly seeking to use it to advance a message about the war in Gaza.
- Gabrielle Goliath and her curators denounce the intervention as an abuse of process and a violation of freedom of expression.
- Some outlets have reported Qatar as the alleged foreign actor based on unnamed sources, a claim not confirmed by South African or Qatari officials.
- Art Periodic, the nonprofit partner for the pavilion, states it no longer has a mandate to proceed after the ministry ended the working arrangement.
- The proposed work, drawn from Goliath’s Elegy series, linked local and colonial-era gendered violence to a section honoring Palestinian poet Hiba Abu Nada, and the pavilion’s final representation remains unresolved after the Biennale submission deadline.