Gabrielle Goliath and the enduring struggle between art, power and the policing of meaning

On Thursday 15 January 2026, South African artist Gabrielle Goliath filed an urgent application against Sport, Arts and Culture Minister Gayton McKenzie for unlawfully cancelling her 2026 Venice Biennale submission Elegy.

The context for this piece comes in the wake of two body blow cancellations, one after the other, for Goliath.

Often performative, Goliath’s work looks at gender-based violence and trauma. The piece Elegy is less about violence and more “about foregrounding practices of mourning, survival and repair”.

The first cancellation came from her long-time gallery, Goodman. The second from McKenzie. The actions of both have spawned enough speculation to fill a large murky pond.

Given the current global profile, one cannot help but be aware of the timing of both rejections. It is interesting that the Goodman Gallery “released” Goliath along with 12 other artists just after her selection to represent SA at the 61st Venice Biennale. You would have thought that they would have been pleased with her achievement and the kudos afforded their gallery.

The gallery gave the official reason for the dismissal as a financial one, rather than a political one.

Goliath’s latest iteration of Elegy, a work begun a decade ago, addresses victims in South Africa, the colonial genocide in Namibia and crimes against humanity/genocide against Palestinian women and children in Gaza. It was elected by an independent committee to be shown at the South African Pavilion at the current Venice Biennale.

After the committee’s selection McKenzie suddenly wanted alterations, citing Elegy as “highly divisive”. Goliath and her curator, Ingrid Masondo, refused, maintaining that this was censorial and contradicted SA’s official stance on the Gaza pavilion.

Then, just days before the Biennale’s confirmation deadline, McKenzie, equipped with a host of excuses, withdrew the Department of Sport, Arts and Culture’s support for the pavilion, effectively cancelling Goliath’s participation.

In the current climate of escalating surveillance and censorship I wondered whether it wasn’t perhaps time to return to the subtle subversiveness of historical painters like Michelangelo, Goya, Holbein and Caravaggio who hinted at, rather than overtly criticise, their powerful employers. Maybe current artists could emulate them, a kind of IYKYK (if you know, you know).

The book The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo’s Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican by Roy Doliner and Benjamin Blech presents a highly debatable but interesting theory that Michelangelo embedded all sorts of visual messages in his paintings to encourage people to challenge the repressive Roman Catholic Church.

According to Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, in the 16th-century the pope’s Master of Ceremonies, Biagio da Cesena, complained about the nudity in The Last Judgment.

Michelangelo took his pictorial revenge painting Cesena in The Last Judgment fresco as Minos, the mythological judge of the underworld, complete with a pair of donkey ears, commenting on his idiocy.

When Cesena complained, recognising himself by his signature buck teeth, the amused pope explained that while he had authority in heaven and on earth, he had no power in the underworld. So short of Michelangelo placing him in Purgatory he could not assist.

While the pope may have enjoyed Michelangelo’s mocking of others, being the butt of the artist’s scorn would have been another story.

Michelangelo gets his revenge against his difficult patron in both placement and characterisation. He gave the curmudgeonly prophet Zechariah the face of Pope Julius II, positioning him at the entrance end of the chapel directly above the main door where the Pope entered. Nothing like seeing yourself as others perceive you; just punishment for not being paid, forcing you to paint the Sistine ceiling when you were a sculptor.

Michelangelo takes it further: he paints a putto leaning over Zechariah/Pope Julius II’s shoulder giving him the “fig” or flipping the bird and therefore disrespecting him.

The Spanish artist famous for his stark dramatic etchings of the horrors of war, Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, was another artist who made fun of his monarch patron, in the portrait Charles IV of Spain and His Family. It is regarded as a stinging criticism of the Bourbon monarchy, whom Goya privately detested for their uselessness and total indifference to Spain’s political upheaval.

Goya painted the hypertensive, dumpy, bewigged king as a no-necked, pink-faced, dim-witted man, the queen a human chihuahua with an overbite, the granny with a massive beauty patch, indicating syphilis, and two other members who appear to be away with the fairies. Interbreeding was clearly flourishing in that royal kingdom. Only the children and animals were safe from the painters’ laser-sharp gaze.

Curiously the family liked the painting. One of the reasons is Goya’s beautiful rendering of all the shiny jewels, medals, ribbons, sashes, and the fine fabrics displayed on the persons of the vain family members. Clearly these were a decoy from the darker meaning of this work.

The Ambassadors by Northern Renaissance artist Hans Holbein the Younger is a sumptuous double portrait full of symbols of opulence, clout and scholarship.

The inclusion of an anamorphic (distorted) skull is interpreted by many art historians as a subtle dig at the vanity and materialism of Holbein’s wealthy patrons. And a powerful reminder that death, the great leveller, will ultimately strip them of all their earthly power and possessions, rendering them meaningless.

The devout and psychopathic painter Michelangelo Caravaggio’s genius lay in bringing the secular into the holy, thereby making it more accessible to ordinary folk.

In his painting Madonna dei Palafrenieri, he depicts the Virgin Mary with the face of a well-known Roman prostitute. When this was discovered, it was instantly removed from the church.

French Impressionist Édouard Manet reputedly clashed regularly with his wealthy patrons and the Salon system (which set the standard for artistic taste and value). Manet subverted the idealised nudes of the time by painting a naked courtesan gazing unruffled at her audience under the title Olympia.

His approach mocked the pretence of the upper classes and their conventions around sexuality and class.

And finally, there is The Meeting by Gustave Courbet.

Here the self- taught painter is shown meeting up with his patron Alfred Bruyas. Neither stands on ceremony and they meet as equals – an approach that would have been regarded as impertinent at the time and yet suggests change is afoot with the rise of the working class, the challenge of the bourgeoise and the democratisation of art.

Many of the artists I have mentioned had no recourse to courts of law and were powerless against their formidable patrons, and thus resorted to subtle visual subversiveness in plain sight to level the playing field.

Hundreds of years later, Goliath won’t need to resort to petty visual snipes for the unlawful, unconstitutional and invalid action by McKenzie, or a dismissal coloured by alleged censorship from a gallery.

Armed with the clout of courts of law and the art public, Gabrielle Goliath should have her place at the 61st Venice Biennale. DM