The SA*DC Biennale

Curated by Raul Jorge Gourgel and Rory Tsapayi

Long gallery: 08.03.25 - 16.04.25

The SA*DC Biennale is a hypothetical fiction, a satirical misconception, and a subversive provocation. Both a parody of and a good-faith engagement with the defining structures of the biennial form and our regional bloc of nation-states, the SADC Biennale* is a conceptual, anti-establishment, and experimental retort.

Raul Jorge Gourgel and Rory Tsapayi invited individual cultural workers and creative collectives to ‘represent’ eleven different countries with ‘national pavilions’ that, by design, unsettle nationalistic ideologies, arbitrary borders, and the logic of the state. These are housed in the SAD*C Giardini, a diorama of the imagined exhibition complex that hosts the Biennale*.  Each pavilion hosts an exhibition of its own, curated under the theme of Towards a Common Relic.

Present at this first edition of the Biennale* under the theme of Towards a Common Relic are: Angola, Botswana, Congo-Brazzaville, DRC, Eswatini, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

The project critiques two institutions founded roughly a century apart. First: the biennial, and especially La Biennale de Venezia (est. 1895) which is a defining form for ‘global’ contemporary art and a vessel for nationalistic soft power. Second: SADC, the Southern African Development Community (est. 1992), a ‘postcolonial’ and dysfunctional grouping of nations whose borders are the direct inheritance of the nineteenth century Scramble for Africa.

The S*ADC Biennale takes the Giardini as a focal point, appropriating the oldest and most prestigious site of La Biennale de Venezia. Founded at the outset of the long-twentieth century, the Giardini’s evolution runs in tandem with the geopolitics of the age. In 1907, King Leopold II’s Belgium premiered the first national pavilion, soon followed by the imperial powers of Great Britain, Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Russia. Today the gardens host 29 permanent national pavilions, with Egypt as the sole African nation onsite and the Global South scarcely represented. At the Arsenale, only South Africa has a dedicated venue, while the remaining 52 African states are resigned to nomadic and peripheral existences if they can afford to participate. In Venice, occidental hierarchies and national disparities are as much on exhibition as the art itself.

Founded in 1992, the SADC was preceded by the Southern African Development Coordination Conference (SADCC), meant as the economic counterpart of the Frontline States which formed in 1975 as a communion of newly independent nations (Angola, Botswana, Lesotho and Mozambique) with the common goal of annihilating white minority rule in southern Africa. In 1980, as Rhodesia died and sovereign Zimbabwe was born, the coalition expanded to include all ‘genuinely independent states’ in the region. The later SADCC was created to facilitate economic cooperation amid the ‘3D’ threats of drought, debt, and destabilisation. After its first democratic elections of 1994, South Africa joined the bloc which now contains sixteen member states. Inheriting the economic infrastructure of the apartheid regime, SA remains the region’s largest economy and a xenophobic and exceptionalist island of development in a sea of scarcity. It is for these reasons and their extension in the contemporary art system that South Africa will not be represented in this inaugural edition of the Biennale*.

The SADC’s neoliberal agenda and maintenance of the political status quo eclipse its capacity to facilitate sociocultural development in the region. Turning the bloc’s motto of “Towards a Common Future” on its head, Gourgel and Tsapayi’s theme of Towards a Common Relic proposes an imagination of regional development outside of colonial and modernist frameworks. Subbing “resources” for “relics” as a unit of a non-linear development, it is an invitation to think through regional commonality and difference with an eye on what survives. This is not a call for a pre-colonial romanticism, but rather for an anti-colonial engagement with the fraught history and present of the region, and an assertion that its future is defined as much by capital flows as by cultural consciousness.

The SAD*C Biennale reimagines how art, cultural identities, and regional cooperation could and could not intersect to both acknowledge, resist and transform nationalisms. It signals a shift towards self- determined cultural expression without and beyond borders.