Gabrielle Goliath – Elegy

Goliath sarà a Venezia con una mostra indipendente di Elegy all’interno della Chiesa di Sant’Antonin, nel sestiere di Castello. L’esposizione consisterà in un’installazione video multicanale che rielabora uno dei lavori più importanti dell’artista, sviluppato nell’arco di oltre un decennio

Comunicato stampa

Gabrielle Goliath’s much anticipated independent exhibition of Elegy at the Chiesa di Sant’Antonin in Castello for La Biennale di Venezia will be expanded by the Elegy Reader – a collective publication of poems gathered from sites of rupture across the global south, from Palestine to Lebanon, Sudan, South Africa, and beyond, created with Ibraaz Publishing.

On Thursday, 7 May, 5–7PM, a public gathering will take place outside Chiesa di Sant’Antonin. Artists, contributors, and guests will read from the Elegy Reader, activating a communal work of mourning that foregrounds solidarity, resilience, survival, and collective creative expression. Copies of the reader will be freely available at the event.

This community-driven project expands upon the pressing concerns of Goliath’s Elegy; a work of ritual mourning, addressing conditions of femicide and rape culture in South Africa, and genocide in Namibia and Gaza. Bringing together poetry and texts responding to histories of displacement, colonialism, and genocide, this gathering of poetry highlights what mourning can accomplish as a radical basis for community, forging connections in and across differences.

The launch of the Elegy Reader in Venice is intended as an insurgent intervention within the Biennale context, asserting voice, presence and poetry against conditions of violence and disregard. As a collective assembly, the Elegy Reader brings together 50 poems, comprising works by the Palestinian poet Heba Abunada, Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad, Haitian poet Danielle Legros Georges, South African writer Maneo Mohale, amongst many others.

Conceived not as an accompaniment but as an extension of Elegy, the reader opens a shared space for mourning, insisting on grief as a collective and political act. Through language, it holds what cannot be resolved yet must nevertheless be spoken.

Gabrielle Goliath will stage an independent exhibition of her acclaimed, long-term performance project Elegy – a ritual lament of shared breath and song – as a multi-channel video installation at the Chiesa di Sant’Antonin in Castello, Venice, from Tuesday, 5 May to Friday, 31 July 2026.

The Elegy Reader is a sister initiative of the Gaza Reader (Volume 1, 2024) organised by Artists Against Apartheid, Bidoun, WAWOG (Writers Against the War on Gaza) and the Kamel Lazaar Foundation.

The Venice presentation of Elegy is enabled by the Bertha Foundation and Ibraaz, and realised in partnership with Fondazione ICA Milano, Galleria Raffaella Cortese, and the Friends of Elegy. Following Venice, Elegy will open at Ibraaz in London in October 2026, before being presented at ICA Milano in January 2027. Further information on Elegy at elegyinvenice.com