South Africa’s 2026 Venice Biennale pavilion debacle reminds us of a longer history of state power, cultural legitimacy, and who gets to speak. It has been a while since questions about the form and meaning of “national” South African art on the international stage and the politics of South African representation have been of acute mainstream public interest with as much fervour as they have been this last week, when Gayton McKenzie, the minister of sport, arts and culture, terminated the department’s contract with Art Periodic to stage South Africa’s national pavilion at the Venice Biennale. South Africa’s art world, used to a consistent participation at the Venice Biennale since South Africa secured a semi-permanent 20-year lease in Venice in 2013, is reeling after this move from left field.
The Venice Biennale is a historic international art festival, often colloquially called the Olympics of Art, because countries participate at a national level. Or, as is now apparent, are prohibited from participating at a national level. This means that some countries own, manage and occupy whole buildings, like mini museums, in which elaborate, usually immersive exhibitions are staged, reflecting something significant of their local art worlds.
Other countries, like South Africa, do not have an entire building, but make use of large gallery-type spaces to present reflections from their art worlds. This is organised via official governmental channels for all participating countries (usually around 90 countries for the art festival). That means that there is no national pavilion without official state confirmation.
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For South Africa, which has participated from 1950 to 1968, in 1993, 1995, and from 2011 onwards, who gets to decide what is meant by a “national representation” of the country’s art has varied over the years, and has always been hotly contested. Pre-democracy, South Africa’s art participation at the Venice Biennale (as well as most of its international exhibition opportunities) was controlled by the South African Association of Arts (SAAA — later reconfigured and renamed as the still extant South African National Association for Visual Arts). It was opaque, but, for the most part, art-community-centric.
The commissioner of the pavilion (ie, the head of the Selection Committee and liaison between South Africa and Venice) was usually a respected curator, art historian, museum director, art educator or (rarely), artist (as with Cecil Skotnes in the 1960s). For two decades, the association decided, internally, who would represent South Africa in Venice, which artworks it would send, and how the artworks would be exhibited and catalogued, with little to no input or support from the government. In fact, since 1950, the SAAA had to plead with the government to apply for and accept invitations to the biennale.
South Africa’s pavilions remained unfunded until the tail end of its first decade of participation, and, after that, they were only ever very poorly and very reluctantly supported. As the century progressed, what used to be an invigorating young arts association, a foil to a previous generation of stodgy, anti-modern artists, slowly turned into a stodgy, static, older arts institution that had to, essentially, become an agent of the apartheid state to maintain its position as “the face of South African arts abroad” (aka the gatekeepers of mainstream international opportunity for South African artists from 1948 to the early 1990s). However, the association was challenged as South Africa’s art world grew acutely political, and in the 1990s, after years of exclusion due to anti-apartheid sanctions, an almost unrecognisable SAAA organised South Africa’s national pavilions with a deliberately transparent selection process, and, for the first time, with people of colour on the advisory boards (the first time artists of colour were represented at the South African national pavilion was in 1964 with Peter Clarke and Amos Langdown).
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