Gabrielle Goliath / Faces of War / 2014
For our opening show in 2014, Goodman Gallery will present Faces of War by Gabrielle Goliath – her first solo show with the gallery.
In contrast to the public and often mediated nature of war, domestic violence, as a scenario of conflict affecting the everyday experience of thousands of men, women and children in South Africa, is confined by definition to the environment of the home – is deemed ‘a private affair’, happening behind closed doors. On account of this ‘sanctum of the home’, as well as the stigma and fear of reprisal associated with any sort of disclosure, the victims as well as perpetrators of this conflict are to a large extent ‘faceless’.
In a series of twelve oversized and strategically altered photographic portraits, Gabrielle Goliath presents a cross-section of ‘everyday South Africans’ as Faces of People who may or may not be Victims or Perpetrators of Domestic Violence. Casting her subjects in a shadow of doubt – each one a potential victim or perpetrator – Goliath invites the viewer to question the unsettling anonymity or ‘facelessness’ of this conflict.
Artworks
About
Gabrielle Goliath
Through the ritual, sonic and social encounters of her art practice, Gabrielle Goliath (b. 1983, South Africa) attends (and tends) to histories and present-day conditions of differentially valued life, reaffirming ways in which black, brown, femme and queer practices of possibility perform the world differently. Each of her works convenes a coming-to – a tenuous community – collapsing the presumed remove and privileged subject position of representation (as white, male, heteronormative) and calling for meetings in and across difference, on terms of complicity, relation and love.
In 2024, Goliath presented her first solo exhibition titled ‘Personal Accounts’, at a major UK institution, Talbot Rice Gallery. Goliath’s immersive, often durational installations have shown across South Africa and internationally. She has won several awards including a Future Generation Art Prize – Special Prize (2019), the Standard Bank Young Artist Award (2019), and the Institut Français, Afrique en Créations Prize at the Bamako Biennale (2017).
Recent exhibitions include: Personal Accounts, Talbot Rice Gallery, University of Edinburgh, UK (2024); Personal Accounts, 60th Venice Biennale (2024). This ongoing body of work is a transnational, decolonial, black feminist project of repair; Beloved, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (2023); Chorus, Dallas Contemporary (2022), Dallas; This song is for…, Kunsthaus Baselland, Basel (2022); This song is for…, Konsthall C, Stockholm (2021); Our Red Sky, Göteborgs Konsthall, Gothenburg (2020); and The Power of my Hands, Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris (2020).
She has won a number of awards including a Future Generation Art Prize – Special Prize (2019), the Standard Bank Young Artist Award (2019), and the Institut Français, Afrique en Créations Prize at the Bamako Biennale (2017).
Collections include: Kunsthalle Zürich; TATE Modern, Frac Bretagne, Iziko South African National Gallery, Johannesburg Art Gallery, and Wits Art Museum.
Goliath lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa.
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