Representing Transitional Justice as Cultural Diplomacy: South Africa’s 'Imaginary Fact' at the Venice Biennale

While transitional justice policies and practices have become fundamental to the ways in which countries emerging from conflict engage with international institutions and international norm compliance, artistic production and participation has become a radical form of political representation in times of political transition. The Venice Biennale influences the development, market, and reputation of the contemporary art world, but it is also a highly networked exercise in cultural diplomacy and state-building. How a state displays itself at the Biennale can effect how that state is perceived on the world stage. The purpose of this paper is to explore South Africa’s participation at the 2013 Biennale in which the country exhibited Imaginary Fact: Contemporary South African Art and the Archive. In the case of South Africa—as I argue throughout the paper—the Biennale provides a platform from which the country seeks to continue to heal its internal wounds while constructing itself as an archetype of political transition in order to share its experience with the international community, but also arguably to re-establish international recognition and capital. Key patterns of representation reveal how the narratives of transitional justice emanating from the South African Pavilion establish this dual foreign policy image. These patterns relate to how certain artworks imagine the country’s violent past and use archives to explore how this past affects the present. The paper arises out of an eight-month period of participant observation fieldwork at the Biennale, which included over seventy semi-structured interviews with artists, exhibition organisers, government representatives, and visitors to the Biennale. The research is firmly interdisciplinary, situated between art theory and international relations.