This year's South African pavilion at the Venice Biennale was, like most before it, born amid controversy. This time it was because of the Department of Arts and Culture's tardiness in appointing curators. The department didn't appoint anyone until last month.When it finally did make an appointment - architect Jeremy Rose and Christopher Till, director of the Apartheid Museum - it left them with "literally three-and-a-half weeks" to put together the exhibition. They had to be flexible and nimble in their execution of their original vision, submitted to the department in September.Somehow they pulled it off, and the exhibition, What Remains is Tomorrow, opened on May 8.Rose and Till made a virtue of their time constraints, and selected and commissioned works that focus on current events, "finding artists who were responding to things as they were happening", says Rose.Till points out that South Africa's narrative of peace and reconciliation seems to be unravelling in events such as xenophobic violence, the defacement and removal of colonial statues, and the Marikana massacre.Including works that respond to these events and setting them in dialogue with works dealing with pregnant moments of the past allowed the curators to complicate and unsettle the myths and distortions of South Africa's historical narratives.The exhibition is anchored by two works from the Apartheid Museum by Angus Gibson: a sound recording of Nelson Mandela's speech at the 1964 Rivonia treason trial and a piece called Telling the Truth?, which includes footage from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. These are set into dialogue with works such as a specially commissioned ash drawing by Diane Victor of bodies in the landscape, which was directly inspired by Marikana. (The ash Victor used is from a miner's handbook and a copy of the constitution.)Haroon Gunn-Salie recast the arms of Jan van Riebeeck from the statue in Cape Town's Adderley Street and painted them red, reframing and "rearticulating" the way we see colonial symbols.Gerald Machona has presented works such as an "Afronaut" space suit made from decommissioned Zimbabwe dollars, dealing with themes of alienation and belonging.Willem Boshoff caused an uproar with his Racist in South Africa work.Fourteen artists are represented in the exhibition, bringing diversity to the historical thread that runs through the pavilion's works. The sense of urgency in the interrogation of the contemporary moment is timely, and the sense that "pulling though" the past in the present moment could add something to the range of the world's futures (a reference to All the World's Futures, curator Okwui Enwezor's title for the biennale's central exhibition) is apt.Let's hope the curators of the next South African pavilion have more time. This is a trick you can't pull off twice...