A History of South Africa at the Venice Biennale The politics of looking South African

Introduction

-       Some brief caveats

-       Setting the discursive scene: national pavilions at the Venice Biennale

o   The Giardini

o   The Arsenale

o   Into the city

o   This is not a national pavilion

1. Not our national pavilion: Nationalism versus modernism and the first South African pavilion of 1950

      - A prelude to Venice: South Africa at the Tate

      - Cultural nation-building and nationalist ambitions

      - A socio-cultural renaissance and national art

      - International interest

      - An invitation to Venice

      - The internationalism of Paris in South Africa

      - Crowdsourcing a national pavilion

      - Selecting South Africa

      - A South Africa and its art introduced to Venice

      - A public responds with parody

      - The defence

2. The Triumph of the modern: South Africa’s first decade at the Venice Biennale

      - The schism between art and reality

      - In the shadow of national spectacle

      - Funding a national identity in Venice

      - The triumph of South African modernism

3. The ‘Spirit of Africa’: An ideological repositioning of South African art in Venice

      - Growing political concerns

      - A local appetite for a ‘South African flavour’

      - The SAAA under fire

      - An ideological repositioning

      - 1968: The ‘spirit of Africa’

      - The May 68 protests and The South African pavilion

4. Pariah pavilion: The Venice Biennale boycotts South Africa

      - South Africa Venice Biennale 1970

      - Home show issues

      - The cultural boycott versus the fine arts

      - The State of the Art according to two conferences

      - Fault lines of the art boycott

      - South Africa in South America

      - The way back to the Biennale: The SAAA surveys its options

5. ‘Here is South Africa’: Nation-building in an era of post-national globalism

      - Postmodern globalism and post-apartheid South Africa

      - A new nation versus globalism at the Johannesburg biennales

      - The significance of the 1993 national pavilion

      - A shift in power and structure

      - ‘Black Africa’ versus South Africa

      - The 1993 national pavilion

      - Incroci del Sud

      - Text and subtext

      - A new nation, justified

      - ‘Made in South Africa’

      - 1995: ‘nothing more than crisis intervention’

      - Malcolm Payne: Walls of Venice

      - A cultural renaissance and the end of an era

6. Contemporary concerns: Nation and representation in the structure and content of South Africa’s 21st-century pavilions

      - 2011: A cause for reform

      - Structural reform

      - The persistence of nationness at the Venice Biennale

      - 2015: The Mandela legacy

      - 2017: Beyond the post-apartheid

      - From exhibition to immersion

      - To see and be seen

      - What remains of the future

Biography

Annchen Bronkowski is a Creative Knowledge Resources Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Cape Town