The Observer is Observed; The Analyzer is Analyzed: The South African Pavilion and its Predicaments

The South African Ministry of Arts and Culture has sponsored the South African pavilion at the Venice Biennale since 1993. Prior to that, the country participated by being included in the Sale Stranier (or the Foreign Halls). Between 1950 and 1968, South Africa, still under apartheid government, featured in the biennale. By the 1970s, the global anti-apartheid movement had led to sanctions and exclusion of South Africa from international sporting and cultural events generally. It was only in 1993, a year before South Africa’s first democratic elections and the end of apartheid, that South Africa was invited again. Since then, it has been represented at each iteration but has been mired in controversies. The Ministry of Arts and Culture outsources the logistics and curation of the pavilion. Service providers are sought through an open tender/bid process. This privatization and approach to the biennale slows down transformation and overlooks socio-economic inequalities, which are the legacy of apartheid. In this paper, we as curators engage with the controversies surrounding the South African Pavilion in relation to the curatorial approaches and the predicaments herein. Then we also focus on why we have selected a theme to respond to the overwhelming rise in protests, racialized social hostility, and the loss of faith in clean governance in South Africa. By focusing on social resilience, we look at how artists articulate the uneasy discourse on citizenship, rights, and social justice in the post-apartheid era.