Untitled (46th Venice Biennale)

South Africa’s invitation to the Venice Biennale in 1995 marked a profound symbolic milestone. It came just one year after the country’s first democratic elections in 1994, which ended the apartheid regime and brought Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress to power.

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At this time, South Africa was undergoing intense national soul-searching, reckoning with the legacy of apartheid—its violence, trauma, and structural inequalities—while also tentatively embracing a new era of freedom, transformation, and nation-building.

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The country's cultural and artistic institutions were also shifting. Artists, who had long worked under censorship and the pressure of resistance art, were beginning to explore new identities, hybrid narratives, and ways to memorialize pain and hope.

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Malcolm Payne, the curator and participating artist, constructed three walls at the entrance of the Giardini (the primary venue for national pavilions at the Biennale). On these walls were 42 glass-fronted funerary urns, each a symbolic container of memory, loss, and identity.

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Four South African artists — Brett Murray, Randolph Hartzenberg, Kagiso Pat Mautloa, and Malcolm Payne himself — contributed two urns each.

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The rest served as silent placeholders or anonymous markers, suggesting the unnamed or unmarked lives lost or affected under apartheid.