From Gaza to Venice — Gabrielle Goliath’s feminist breath transcends national censorship

The art of feminist breathing is capacious. It attunes us to our material interdependence with others. It draws us into communities of care and mutual obligation. It forges lifeworlds from the chokeholds of racism and hetero-patriarchy.

These lessons have been crystallised again by recent events following the selection of artist Gabrielle Goliath’s long-term performative installation Elegy as South Africa’s official choice for the 2026 Venice Biennale.

Since its inception in 2015, Elegy has brought together female vocalists to enact a prolonged keening for women and LGBTQIA+ people lost to sexualised, gender-based, genocidal and settler-colonial violence. The list of womxn commemorated in this way, by dedicated performances staged around the globe, continues to grow.

In an act of chauvinism remarkable even at this time of resurgent global misogyny, the independent selection committee’s unanimous decision was overturned by Department of Arts and Culture Minister Gayton McKenzie, who insisted Goliath’s work was “highly divisive in nature.”

A self-proclaimed Zionist, McKenzie took issue especially with the installation’s inclusion of the Palestinian poet Hiba Abu Nada in Goliath’s list of named women deserving of our collective grief. Goliath’s tribute to Abu Nada is accompanied by a ghazal — an ancient Arabic ode — in honour of the latter’s poem I Grant You Refuge, written in October 2023 just 10 days before she was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Khan Younis, Gaza.

The iteration of Elegy planned for the Venice Biennale was expected to also address the South African scourge of femicide and the Herero and Nama genocide in early 20th-century Namibia.

McKenzie’s decision is confounding, not least given South Africa’s leadership in the ongoing legal case at the International Court of Justice against Israel for the crime of genocide in Gaza. Cancelling a work so explicitly concerned with South Africa’s crisis of gender-based violence and femicide (GBVF) also runs counter to President Cyril Ramaphosa’s declaration of GBVF as a national disaster, barely a month before McKenzie’s decision.

Unlike McKenzie, whose determination effectively strips women such as Abu Nada of the right to be mourned at the Venice pavilion reserved for South Africa, Goliath’s life’s work has been devoted to expanding our capacity for empathy in the face of loss.

For Goliath, ethical concern defies the boundaries of nation, generation and related fictions of division. As she explains, in Elegy, “loss becomes a site for community, and for empathetic encounters across difference”. This communal ethos is at the core of the work’s formal aesthetics, which Goliath carefully designed to frustrate solipsistic habits of detached observation.

Goliath has long harnessed the respiratory intelligence of the body towards the work of collaborative feminist repair. As I argue at length in my book Wayward Feeling: Audio-Visual Culture and Aesthetic Activism in Post-Rainbow South Africa, the breath is key to how Elegy draws its audiences into the collective work of mourning and commemorative recall.

An hour-long ritual

The roughly hour-long ritual takes somatosensory form in a prolonged, sonorous exhale. In each of these performances, operatically trained singers line up in a darkened room to take turns on a spotlit podium, where they sound a single note until their voices falter and they run out of breath. From this waning of breath emerges another voice, stretching seven distinct vocals into a single, sustained note.

This protracted, resonant exhale hauntingly summons the murdered women into the gallery space, each literally robbed of their last breath. The exhale also works materially to activate the parasympathetic nervous system of the breather, in turn moving the autonomic functions of the body towards rest and release in an act of healing transmitted between each of the vocalists and those in attendance.

It matters that this extended interpersonal exhale yokes bodies together in community, where vitality is drawn from long lineages of embodied feminist solidarity, labour and care. The work, in other words, epitomises the art of feminist breathing — what Jean-Thomas Tremblay, in their book Breathing Aesthetics, defines as “a set of rituals for living through the foreclosure of political presents and futures”.

It is fitting, therefore, that Elegy’s termination has powered such a groundswell of feminist activism. This includes the commitment by Goliath’s legal team and her curator, Ingrid Masondo, to appeal a high court ruling that refused — with punitive costs — to have Elegy’s participation reinstated; several open letters and a letter of solidarity by an independent collective of arts and cultural practitioners delivered to Ramaphosa; and a still-growing outpouring of black feminist theorising across news outlets and social media feeds.

Elegy’s capacity to move publics towards more gender-just, anti-colonial futures has further inspired the London-based initiative Ibraaz, a collective dedicated to “art, culture and ideas from the Global Majority”, alongside the Bertha Foundation in South Africa, to arrange for the independent showing of Elegy at Venice’s Chiesa di Sant’Antonin, a venue close to the Venice Biennale.

Much like the vocalists sustaining each other beyond the end of each exhale, this chorus of feminist solidarity forges the conditions of breathability from the strangleholds of gender-based and genocidal violence. DM