Gabrielle GoliathBerenice
Goodman Gallery New York is pleased to present Berenice, a solo exhibition by acclaimed South African artist Gabrielle Goliath. Featured in the show are 22 photographic works from the artist’s long-term commemorative series, Berenice, including three newly-produced portraits titled Berenice 40-42. The images sit in tender relation to the series of 11 Berenice portraits (Berenice 29-39) currently showing at the New Photography 2025: Lines of Belonging exhibition (14 September 2025 – 17 January 2026) at the Museum of Modern Art. The Goodman Gallery exhibition coincides with Personal Accounts opening at the Museum of Modern Art PS1 (6 November 2025 – 16 March 2026), presenting a unique opportunity for audiences in New York to encounter her practice in three spaces across the city.
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The images themselves are starkly beautiful: at once haunting and provocative in their address. For each portrait in the series, a woman or LGBTIQ+ individual of colour offers themself as a surrogate presence, ‘standing in’ for Berenice as each of them marks another year of her life unlived. In this way, a growing community of artists, writers, musicians, activists, mothers and friends join Goliath in what she calls “a life-work of mourning”. Rooted in a black feminist politics of care, Berenice reaffirms black girlhood as both loveable and grievable.
Following installations in Venice, Tunis, Edinburgh, and most recently Kyiv, the solo showing of Personal Accounts at Museum of Modern Art PS1 marks the US premiere of the artist’s acclaimed, ongoing video and sound cycle, Personal Accounts (2024–). Additionally, her immersive, audiovisual installation, Elegy for Two Ancestors, is currently sounding at the MOMENTA Biennale d'art contemporain in Montreal (until 1 November 2025). First performed at the 2024 Venice Biennale, this sonic lament tends to the losses and contemporary implications of the Ovaherero and Nama Genocide in Namibia (1904-1908).
Artist Bio
Through the ritual, sonic and social encounters of her practice, Gabrielle Goliath attends (and tends) to histories and present-day conditions of differentially valued life, reaffirming ways in which black, brown, femme and queer practices perform the world differently. Her work troubles a racial/sexual regime of representation, calling for meetings in and across difference, on terms of complicity, relation and love.
She has received several awards, including the Future Generation Art Prize - Special Prize (2019), Standard Bank Young Artist Award (2019), and Institut Français, Afrique en créations Prize at the Bamako Biennale (2017). Her work is held in collections such as MoMA, Tate Modern, Kunsthalle Zürich, Mudam Luxembourg, Frac Bretagne, and Iziko South African National Gallery. She lives and works in Johannesburg.
