South Africa Cancels Venice Biennale Artist Due to Gaza-Related Work

The South African culture minister has cancelled the artist chosen to represent the country at this year’s Venice Biennale, reports the Art Newspaper. In December 2025 an independent committee selected Gabrielle Goliath and curator Ingrid Masondo to present at the South African pavilion. The work the pair had proposed was Elegy (2015–ongoing), a performance work about gender-based violence in South Africa, which they were planning to update to address violence against women in Namibia and Gaza. On 22 December culture minister Gayton Mackenzie requested that the Gaza section be altered. In a response shared with Apollo, Goliath and Masondo stated that this ‘amounts to censorship’ and contradicts South Africa’s stance on the war in Gaza, pointing to proceedings brought by South Africa at the International Court of Justice in 2023 that accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. Goliath and Masondo have called on South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, to intervene; a spokesperson for Ramaphosa told the Art Newspaper that they were as yet unable to comment on this matter but that the country’s position on Gaza was ‘unchanged’. The selection committee for the South African pavilion has also written an open letter in support of Goliath, stating that it ‘reject[s] all forms of censorship and intimidation’. As well as having her pavilion cancelled, Goliath has been dropped by Goodman Gallery, which has represented her for 10 years. The gallery says that this is because of financial issues, and not a result of the pavilion’s cancellation. After years of falling enrolments and major financial deficits, the Californian College of the Arts (CCA) will close in 2027, the Art Newspaper reports. CCA, which opened in 1907, is California’s oldest private art school and the last of its kind in the Bay Area; notable alumni include Bernice Bing and Hank Willis Thomas. In 2024 CCA announced that it was facing a $20m deficit and began emergency fundraising, bringing in nearly $45m, including $22.5m from the Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang Foundation. (Jen-Hsun Huang is the founder and CEO of the tech company Nvidia.) Students expected to graduate by 2027 will be able to continue their studies, while the rest of the student body will be transferred to different institutions. The fate of the school’s 311 staff members is currently unknown. The Nashville-based Vanderbilt University will purchase CCA’s San Francisco campus and its properties in Oakland for conversion into the university’s West Coast outpost. Vanderbilt will continue to operate the Wattis Institute, the school’s contemporary art museum. Beatriz González, the Colombian artist, curator and art historian known in her home country as ‘la maestra’, has died at the age of 93, the artist’s gallery, Casas Riegner, announced on 10 January. Born in 1932 in Bucaramanga in the north of Colombia, González grew up during La Violencia, a civil war that lasted from 1948–58. The conflict had a major impact on González’s work, with the artist – who had made her name in the 1960s through her bold reinterpretations of paintings from Western art history – later reproducing historical and contemporary photographs from newspapers that captured social and political unrest in Colombia. González also worked as chief curator at the Museo Nacional de Colombia between 1989 and 2003. Her first retrospective in the UK and her largest exhibition to date in Europe opens at the Barbican on 25 February and runs until 10 May.