Gabrielle Goliath / Chorus & This Song is For Vol I / 2021
On the 24th of August 2019, Uyinene Mrwetyana, a nineteen-year-old student at the University of Cape Town, was raped, tortured and bludgeoned to death by Luyanda Botha, who worked at her local post office. The following day Botha dumped her remains in an open field, dousing her body with petrol and setting it alight.
Uyinene’s murder sparked public outcry: vigils were held, people wore black, thousands gathered in protest outside the South African Parliament in Cape Town, and nationwide. In response, the government acknowledged gender-based violence (GBV) and femicide as a national crisis, assigning over one billion South African Rand to emergency interventions and initiating a ‘National Strategic Plan’ for GBV. The puncture, exception and profound national reckoning of this crisis moment held for many the promise of an historic turning point.
The days and then months that followed, however, gave way once more to the steady, incremental and terrifying reality of this crisis as norm, as an everyday of permissible violence. Women, children, trans and nonbinary individuals continue to be victimised and killed. This is the violence of rape culture, rooted in the deep structure and social wounding of white, colonial, patriarchal power, and daily reconstituted through the misogynistic, homophobic and Afrophobic behaviours of toxic masculinity. It is a violence of ambivalence, a disavowal of the human, through which raced, gendered and sexualised bodies remain the rapeable, killable, disposable matter of ungrievable life.
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.
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). Her work features in numerous public and private collections, including Kunsthalle Zürich, TATE Modern, Frac Bretagne, Iziko South African National Gallery, Johannesburg Art Gallery, and Wits Art Museum. She lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Recent exhibitions include Chorus, Dallas Contemporary (2022), Dallas; This song is for…, Kunsthaus Baselland, Basel (2022); The Normal, Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburg (2021); 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). Her work features in numerous public and private collections, including Kunsthalle Zürich, TATE Modern, Frac Bretagne, Iziko South African National Gallery, Johannesburg Art Gallery, and Wits Art Museum.
www.gabriellegoliath.com
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