Events with Gabrielle goliath

On October 12, Gabrielle Goliath's Personal Accounts will open at Jaou Tunis, a contemporary art biennial running from October 9-November 9.  Personal Accounts is envisioned as a process of transnational, decolonial, black feminist repair addressing the global normativity of patriarchal violence, and foregrounding the many ways Black, brown, Indigenous, femme, queer, non-binary and trans individuals survive and thrive.  In cycles produced in cities across the world, women and gender-diverse collaborators share their personal accounts of survival and repair. These are not only account of violence, but also of the creative and often fugitive ways in which survivors assert life and possibility within and despite conditions of negation. In a decision taken together with the collaborators, the spoken words of each account are withheld. What remains is a sonic stream of in-between moments: breaths, swallows, sighs, cries, humming, even laughter – invoking 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 experiences of survivors. It urges us to embrace more collective, embodied, survivor-centric ways of coming to know, hear and recognize each other.  At the opening, our own Deborah Thomas will be in dialogue with Gabrielle, poet Maneo Refiloe Mohale, anthropologist Meryem Sellami, and Sabah Ennaïfar (collection manager of the Kamel Lazaar Foundation).

We are also excited to co-sponsor the performance of Gabrielle Goliath's Elegy at the end of the Venice Biennale in November.  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. For each performance, a eulogistic text is shared, scripted by a family member or friend of the individual commemorated.  The performance in Venice has been designed to memorialize those individuals who were displaced or killed during the genocidal colonial project in Namibia, and a speculative reflection was written by scholar-activist Dr Zoé Samudzi.
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