Goodman Gallery Cape Town 15 – 24 October 2015
The performance piece that is Elegy epitomizes the deeply poetic work of Gabrielle Goliath, whose practice has over a number of years addressed situations of violence perpetrated against women. The South African-born artist is becoming known for her evocative political installations and performances.
Originating in lengthy research processes, Goliath’s photographs, installations, and performances critically negotiate the complexities of gender-based violence in South Africa. Her style has a poetic quality, punctuated by unsettling visceral elements. Rather than sensationalising the violence itself, her concern is primarily with memorializing the individuals victimised by acts of brutal and sexualised violence. This she accomplishes with powerful metaphors for essentially inexpressible experiences, evoking in a confluence of forms a sense of loss and horror.
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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