Personal Accounts

Gabrielle Goliath
Personal Accounts, 2014
five channel video installation of digital video and sound
Variable Dimensions

A 5-channel video installation, Personal Accounts reflects on the politics of sexualised violence – as determining who can speak and who is silenced. Each of the five video portraits presents a woman, who bravely discloses her experience of domestic violence, and in some instances rape. In a demonstrative act of censorship, the spoken words of these personal accounts are extracted, problematically muting the dialogue. What remains, on the one hand, is a dialogue of gaps, of absences – whilst on the other, emphasised in the residual sonics of breath, in swallows, in the clearing of a throat, is the bodily presence of the women themselves. Each one the living, breathing palimpsest of a violence of inscription and erasure.