Gabrielle Goliath Dossier 2024

Gabrielle Goliath: Personal Accounts, 2024-
Venice Biennale, Stranieri Ovunque, Foreigners Everywhere
4 x multi-channel video & sound cycles

Personal Accounts is a transnational, decolonial, black feminist project of repair.

As an ongoing series of video and sound cycles (first initiated in 2014), Personal Accounts addresses the global normativity of patriarchal violence and the multiplicity of ways in which black, brown, indigenous, femme, queer, non-binary and trans individuals survive – cultivating para conditions in which to thrive.

In cycles produced in cities across the world, women and gender-diverse collaborators share their personal accounts of survival and repair. At times they revisit traumatic experiences of physical, sexual, emotional and/or material harm. In other instances they unpack the more incremental, everyday structures, norms, expectations and encounters that uphold patriarchy and recycle the precarity of feminine and non-gender-normative lives. But these are not accounts of violence only. Rather, they trace and celebrate the creative, often fugitive ways in which survivors assert life and possibility within and despite conditions of negation.

In a decision taken by the artist, with the prior consent of her collaborators, the spoken words of each account are withheld. What remains is a paralinguistic sonic stream of in-between moments: breaths, swallows, sighs, cries, humming, even laughter – inducing the beside, nearby, adjacent and beyond of what is said, not said, or if said, not heard. Foregoing lexicality, this is a gesture of care and recognition, disarming the preconditions of ‘legibility’ and ‘believability’ that so regularly undermine the testimonies (and so experiences) of survivors. Asserted instead is the shared breath and presence of the collaborators themselves.

As the different cycles collectively sound, participants are drawn into a para space of sonic entanglement, of personal accounts that exceed the voice/voiceless dichotomy of political representation. This calls for a different kind of relation, a politics of love and avowal that doesn’t disregard intersectional difference, contextual specificities, or the incommensurability of suffering, but asks for more collective, embodied, survivor-centric ways of coming to know, hear and recognise each other.

The installation in Venice includes two full Personal Accounts video cycles (There’s a river of birds in migration and Deinde Falase), and two video diptychs extracted from two larger video cycles (Mango Blossoms and Lago di Como).

Acknowledgements
Project produced by Gabrielle Goliath, with support from: Galleria Raffaella Cortese - Milan, Albisola; Goodman Gallery - Johannesburg, Cape Town, London, New York; Kamel Lazaar Foundation; Department of Journalism, OsloMet University; and Talbot Rice Gallery, University of Edinburgh.

Special thanks to the Association Tunisienne des Femmes Démocrates, Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre, Telefono Donna, Melissa Parry, and Make Perceive.

There’s a river of birds in migration, (Personal Accounts), 2024
4-channel video & sound installation
filmed in Johannesburg (2023)
Edition of 3 + AP
 

The title of this 4-channel cycle is taken from a liturgy scripted, composed and performed for the occasion by artist, activist and House of Diamonds mother, Treyvone Moo.

There’s a river of birds in migration
A nation of women with wings
A river of birds in migration
A nation of mothers who sing

Treyvone is joined by Maneo, Sapphire and Hopewell, who together share personal accounts of trans precarity and survival in Johannesburg, South Africa. In a crisis norm of anti-black, anti-femme, homophobic and transphobic violence, trauma is everyday and everywhere. Nevertheless, these personal accounts exceed the conditions of negation from which they are spoken, read and sung. Asserted alongside grief, disappointment, fears and losses are hope, creativity, beauty, community, poetry, desire, generosity, faith, transition, love and, perhaps most emphatically, presence.

Deinde Falase (Personal Accounts), 2024
3-channel video & sound installation
filmed in Johannesburg (2023)
Edition of 3 + AP
 

As a well-known news anchor at the Nigerian Television Authority in Abuja, it fell to Deinde Falase to publicly announce the Same-Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Bill, signed into law by President Goodluck Jonathan on January 7, 2014. In addition to criminalising same-sex marriage, the bill further imposed a 10-year prison sentence on individuals engaging in or ‘making a show’ of same-sex amorous relationships, as well as those frequenting gay clubs or associating with organisations or societies supportive of gay rights. Shortly after the announcement, Deinde left Nigeria for South Africa, where the rights of LGBTIQ+ people are constitutionally enshrined. Ten years later, however, he is still an asylum seeker without a work permit, unable to find employment despite his credentials, which include a Masters Degree from the University of Leeds. Failed by yet another state, the precarity of his experience is heightened by the everyday threat of Afrophobic and homophobic violence in South Africa. Deinde’s account is shared in three parts. In the centre panel he addresses his beloved mother, who died before he felt able to fully disclose his sexual identity, and whose funeral in Nigeria he was unable to attend. The account to the right is directed towards his supportive elder brother who lives in the USA, and to the left, his younger brother in Nigeria who has all but disowned him.

Mango Blossoms (Personal Accounts), 2024
video diptych, extract from 22-channel video & sound installation (11 video diptychs)
filmed in Edinburgh (2024)
Edition of 3 + AP

Survival is mango blossoms, memory, starry skies, friendships (imperfect), dancing in the rain, going to art school, essential oils (pine scented), finishing a degree, keeping the faith, disbelieving in god, lost in the cosmos, found in journaling, poetry, remembering, not forgiving, refusing, rerouting, re-learning (to love), or not, choosing transition, transcendence, a house boat commune, channelling Haifa Wehbe. It is more than one thing (victimhood), one angle (scrutiny), one account (continuity = credibility), one timeline (healing). Gathered in this cycle of eleven accounts is a tenuous community of immigrants, activists, students, survivors - based in, from, or passing through Edinburgh. In dual video accounts they map out experiences of misogyny, racism and rape; of harassment and disregard; of state, church and familial cultures of violence and disavowal; and of gender-critical agendas in Scottish social and political hierarchies that actively undermine black, brown, femme, queer and trans wellbeing. Some collaborators reveal their names, show their faces, claim visibility. Others show-up differently, for reasons of self-care, safety and/or a willed opacity. What all of them share in so many ways is something of what survival looks, feels and sounds like, and what it means in spite of all - in the words of one who chooses to withhold her name - “to navigate your life with love, courage and wisdom”.

Lago di Como (Personal Accounts), 2024
video diptych, extract from 16-channel video & sound installation (7 video diptychs & 2 single video channels)
filmed in Como (2024)
Edition of 3 + AP

Lake Como is beautiful, wealthy people retire there. It’s the north Italian idyll: lakes, mountains, villas, wine, food, lifestyle. It is also a place of fugitive arrivals and departures - of tentative community, precarious labour and unbelonging, And, cutting across its differential hierarchies (of race, culture, privilege and legal status), patriarchy draws a fault line, marking feminised lives as available to violence and subjecting survivors to (further) social and political invalidation. Every year, the Como branch of Telefona Donna responds to over 250 new cases of gendered violence and sexual assault, offering psycho-social support, legal counsel and love to women in distress. Shared in this cycle of Personal Accounts are the difficulties, hopes and asserted life practices of nine survivors: artists, writers, cleaners, mothers, entrepreneurs. For some this is home, for others yet another making of it, having arrived in Lombardy (for so many reasons) from Senegal, Morocco, Brazil, Ukraine, Bangladesh, Albania and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Connecting this tight Telefona Donna family - across their many differences - is not the common bind and social circumscription of ‘victimhood’, but the nourishment, affection, solidarity and joy through which they exceed it. Como is beautiful - made beautiful in these quotidian offerings of arrival, transition, home-making and repair: in Zohra’s prayers, in Diarra’s bar, in Ecaterina’s photo book, and in the fragile remains of what these personal accounts choose to reveal and withhold.

Personal Accounts, 2014
5-channel video installation of digital video and sound
Edition of 3 + AP
 

Produced in Cape Town in 2014, this first iteration of Personal Accounts addresses the everyday lived precarity of black and brown women living in South Africa.

In five intimate video portraits, Brenda, Zipho, Mercia, Christolene, and Charmaine (the artist’s mother) bravely disclose personal experiences of physical, sexual, emotional and/or material harm. In a decision taken by the artist, with the prior consent of her collaborators, the spoken words of each video account are withheld. What remains is a paralinguistic sonic stream of in-between moments: breaths, swallows, sighs, cries, humming, even laughter – inducing the beside, nearby, adjacent and beyond of what is said, not said, or if said, not heard. Foregoing lexicality, these modified accounts unsettle the preconditions of ‘legibility’ and ‘believability’ that so regularly undermine the testimonies and experiences of survivors. Asserted instead is the shared breath and presence of the collaborators themselves. This calls for a different kind of relation, a politics of love and avowal that does not disregard intersectional difference, contextual specificities, or the incommensurability of suffering, but asks for more collective, embodied, survivor-centric ways of coming to know, hear and recognise each other.

Personal Accounts, 2014 was filmed in the artist’s apartment in Cape Town, and produced with the support of St Anne’s Homes, a non-governmental organisation providing shelter, care and empowerment to abused, destitute and pregnant mothers with young children in Cape Town since 1904. 

This iteration of Personal Accounts is in the TATE Modern collection.

Gabrielle Goliath: Beloved
Goodman Gallery Johannesburg
26 October - 24 November 2023

Beloved. Or as Christina Sharpe phrases it (with characteristic poise), be loved.

In this ongoing and very personal series of drawings and prints, the artist summons and celebrates a chorus of both radical and quotidian femme presences: poets, priestesses, activists, artists, parents and prodigies. Beloved is an ode, a work of the heart – a labour of recognition, thanks and love.

These three remain, 2023
12-channel sound & light installation
Edition of 4 + AP
 

these three remain
a sister and two brothers
in the wake of suicide, orange blossoms, lilac brocade tiles school books and alcoholism
a bruising line of patrilineal violence

he loved music. that was his gift to us
these three remain, faith, hope and love
conditions of possibility in the tangled afterlives
of enslavement, displacement, indenture, extraction the humiliation of blackness, and brownness
love in the grammar of violence
violence in the grammars of love

love remains
in the wound, in survival
in spite of
in the cracks and crevices and dust-motes in dancing, laughing, crying, being still
in the music

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Love sounds, and resounds, as listeners enter the light bathed space of These three remain. In the sonic embrace of its twelve speakers, an evolving, body-saturating soundscape animates and entwines over seven thousand samples of the word “love”, drawn from lifeplaylists compiled by the artist and her brothers, Gaston and Jon-Paul. Washed in pastel hues and sequenced in 12-channel surround sound, the installation offers a tenuous, euphoric spacetime otherwise - an entanglement of loves, sounding as the resonant, dissonant, disorderly remains of possibility.

Gabrielle Goliath: This song is for...
Kunsthaus Baselland, Basel
13 May - 17 July 2022

Curated by Ines Goldbach

Goliath gained international recognition with her groundbreaking installation This song is for ... which debuted in Kyiv in 2019, following years of research, encounters, interviews and collaborations. Since then, the work has travelled widely, initiating discussions in diverse sociopolitical contexts. For this complex two-channel video installation, Goliath asked survivors of rape to share with her a song of deep and personal significance, whether related to their experience of trauma or their journey of healing. These songs were subsequently re-performed by a collaborating group of women and gender-queer led musical ensembles. In this moving piece, which will now be shown in Switzerland for the first time, the dedication songs and shared testimonies of the ten survivors speak to the global severity of sexual violence, and powerfully reaffirm claims to life, love and hope in the wake of unspeakable violence.

For Goliath, This song is for … asks for something more than the passive remove of witness, drawing participants into a complicit, entangled aesthetic encounter. As she says, “I sense this possibility in a work like This song is for …, in the kind of involved encounters the work asks for—as people relate across difference, across the incommensurability of another’s suffering, and participate in the urgent, difficult, but I believe transformative working of this beauty in-spite-of”.

In addition to the installation, Goliath’s newly extended photographic series, Berenice, will premiere at Kunsthaus Baselland. This ongoing series of commemorative portraits marks the absent presence of Berenice, a childhood friend of the artist’s who was killed in an incident of domestic violence. In Berenice 10-28, nineteen brown women ‘stand in’ as surrogates for Berenice, each one marking a year unlived, from the year of Berenice’s death in 1991 to that of the series’ completion in 2010. Goliath has since decided to revisit the series, reanimating its commemorative gesture in eleven new portraits. Whilst holding to some of the formal qualities of the first series, Berenice 29-39 (2022) introduces differences as well, tracing what she describes as the “life work of mourning”. Berenice is a cornerstone of the artist’s practice, marking for her a certain ethical turn towards a community-driven politics of care.

Goliath’s work not only confronts us with the violent fractures of human coexistence, but also with the possibility of survival, and the difficult but enabling conditions of hope and community. This is the in-spite-of, the otherwise of her practice, reminding us of the mutual bearing we share, and the possibility of finding even within conditions of normative violence the possibility of imagining and realising the world differently. 

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This song is for..., 2019
22-channel video & sound installation
Edition of 3 + AP

In This song is for... Gabrielle Goliath returns to and re-performs the popular convention of the dedication song, in collaboration with a group of women and gender-queer led musical ensembles.

Playing sequentially within the immersive, sonic space of the installation is a unique collection of dedication songs, each chosen by a survivor of rape and performed as a newly produced cover-version. These are songs of personal sig- nificance to the survivors – songs that transport them back to a particular time and place, evoking a sensory world of memory and feeling.

A sonic disruption is introduced at a point within each song; a recurring musical rupture recalling the ‘broken record’ effect of a scratched vinyl LP. Presented in this performed disruption is an opportunity for listeners to affectively inhabit a contested space of traumatic recall – one in which the de-subjectifying violence of rape and its psychic afterlives become painfully entangled with personal and political claims to life, dignity, hope, faith, even joy.

This work is in the Kunsthaus Zurich collection.

Berenice, 2010-
Pigment ink on cotton Baryta

“Berenice, a name spoken over me, into me, never to be mine, and yet mine and of my heart - to be borne, as part of me and to be shared... On Christmas eve 1991, news came of a not-so-silent night. Berenice, my childhood friend, was dead; shot at home in what was spoken of after - when spoken of at all - as a ‘domestic incident’. The next day, my mother took me over to their house to share our condolences with the family. On seeing me her mother hailed me, calling out a name - not Gabrielle, but Berenice - and then held me so tight and for so long.”

In Berenice 10-28 (2010), nineteen brown women offer themselves as surrogate presences, ‘stand- ing in’ for Berenice. In the acknowledged (but nevertheless insistent) failure of this gesture, each sitter marks her absent presence – one portrait for every year unlived, from her death in 1991 to the series’ realisation in 2010.

In 2022, the artist decided to revisit the work as Berenice 29-39, reanimating its commemorative gesture as a “life-work of mourning”. This time in colour, the eleven portraits present another community of peers, older now, but still bearing this name as a collective work of refusal.

“For we cannot imagine and seek to realise a world otherwise, if we fail to mourn and bear with us those lost to or still surviving an order of violence we hope to - and must - transform.”

The series will continue.

Chorus, 2021
2-channel video & sound installation
Edition of 3 + AP
 

On the 24th of August 2019, Uyinene Mrwetyana, a 19-year old student at the University of Cape Town, was raped, tortured and bludgeoned to death by Luyanda Botha, who worked at her local post office. The following day Botha dumped her remains in an open field, dousing her body with petrol and setting it alight.

Uyinene’s murder sparked public outcry: vigils were held, people wore black, thousands gath- ered in protest outside the South African Parliament in Cape Town, and nationwide. In response, the government acknowledged gender-based violence (GBV) and femicide as a national crisis, assigning over a billion South African Rand to emergency interventions and initiating a ‘National Strategic Plan’ for GBV. The puncture, exception and profound national reckoning of this cri- sis-moment held for many the promise of an historic turning point.

The days and then months that followed, however, gave way once more to the steady, incremen- tal and terrifying reality of this crisis as norm, as an everyday of permissible violence. Women, children, trans and nonbinary individuals continue to be victimised and killed. This is the violence of rape culture, rooted in the deep structure and social wounding of white, colonial, patriar- chal power, and daily reconstituted through the misogynistic, homophobic and Afrophobic be- haviours of toxic masculinity. It is a violence of ambivalence, a disavowal of the human, through which raced, gendered and sexualized bodies remain the rapeable, killable, disposable matter of ungrievable life.

In Chorus, members of the University of Cape Town Choir sound a lament for Uyinene Mrwetyana – not as song, but the internally generated resonance of a hum, collectively sustained as a mutual offering of breath. In the utter loss marked by this labour, a certain recuperative gesture is nev- ertheless achieved, asserting conditions for hope in the communal recognition of Black feminine life. 

The choir’s performance resonates in intimate relation to the haunting presence of an empty rostra, its quietude marking the absent presence of six hundred and seventy-two individuals list- ed on a commemorative roll, whose lost lives similarly call for the long, collective, and as we must hope, transformative work of mourning.

Chorus is presented with the blessing of the Uyinene Mrwetyana Foundation

Elegy, 2019-
10-channel video & sound installation
Edition of 3 + AP

Elegy is a long-term commemorative performance project, initiated in 2015 and staged in locations from Johannesburg to São Paulo, Paris, Basel, Munich and Amsterdam. Each performance gathers a group of seven female vocal performers who collectively enact a ritual of mourning, sustaining a single haunting tone over the course of an hour. Invoked in the ritual gesture of each performance is the absent presence of a named woman or LGBTIQ+ individual raped and killed in South Africa. For those immersed in its sonic wake, Elegy is an opportunity not only to grapple with a normative crisis of patriarchal violence, but to reaffirm the fullness, beauty and insistence of black, brown, femme and queer lives.

In an economy of differentially valued life, Elegy asserts conditions of hope and avowal, memorialising (as loveable and grievable) the lives of individuals lost to the physical, ontological and structural violence of rape culture and femicide in South Africa. For each performance, a eulogistic text is shared, scripted by a family member or friend of the individual commemorated. In the cases of Louisa van de Caab (d. 1786) and Cornelia van Piloane (d.~1766) – two women enslaved and murdered in the Cape Colony – speculative texts of remembrance and care were written by historian Dr Saarah Jappie. Accounting for an historically informed present of anti-black, anti-femme violence, Elegy calls for solidarity and relation in and across difference.

Refusing spectacle and the regular objectification of traumatized black, brown, femme and queer bodies, Goliath turns to ritual, sound and a praxis of relationality, offering in Elegy a space for transformative empathic encounters. Here, grief collapses representation and loss becomes an alternative site for community and imagination. In the paralinguistic flow of this sonic lament, she abandons melody, narrative and codified legibility, drawing participants into a more visceral, resonant aesthetic experience. And in the liminal space of this irresolution (rather than closure or catharsis) she asks us to collectively perform a political work of mourning.

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A selection of documented Elegy performances are shown as an immersive 10-channel video & sound installation, commemorating Camron Britz, Hannah Cornelius, Eunice Ntombifuthi Dube, Kagiso Maema, Lerato ‘Tambai’ Moloi, Sizakele Sigasa & Salome Masooa, Noluvo Swelindawo, Joan Thabeng, Louisa van de Caab, and Cornelia van Piloane. 

Elegy- Noluvo Swelindawo (2018), is a photographic series of 7 portraits, invoking the absent presence of Noluvo Swelindawo, who was abducted from her home and murdered by Sigcine Mdani on the 3rd of December 2016.

Living Just Enough: Sonia Boyce in conversation with Gabrielle Goliath. Moderated by curator and scholar (PhD candidate, Columbia University) Oluremi C. Onabanjo. 

In Conversation | Gabrielle Goliath and Maneo Mohale. This gathering is in collaboration with the annual, open-access Global Blackness Summer School, presented by the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender & Class at the University of Johannesburg. Filmed live at Goodman Gallery Johannesburg on 11 November 2023.

Goodman Gallery Presents: Gabrielle Goliath