Gabrielle Goliath’s (b.1983) practice works with and within the histories, life worlds and present-day conditions of black, brown, femme and queer life, refusing its terminal demarcation within a racial-sexual paradigm of violence that governs post-colonial/post-apartheid social worlds. For Goliath, this is the life-work of mourning – as conditions for hope – for, “to imagine and seek to realise the world otherwise is to bear with us those lost to or still surviving an order of violence we hope to and must transform”.
Goliath’s immersive installations have shown across South Africa and internationally. Her video and sound work Chorus (2021) recently debuted at the Goodman Gallery in Cape Town, and will travel to Dallas Contemporary and the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2022. Recent exhibitions include The Normal, Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburg; This song is for…, Konsthall C, Stockholm; Our Red Sky, Göteborgs Konsthall, Gothenburg; and The Power of my Hands, Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris. 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). Her work features in numerous public and private collections, including Kunsthalle Zürich, TATE Modern, Iziko South African National Gallery, Johannesburg Art Gallery, and Wits Art Museum