The South African artist Gabrielle Goliath is taking part in “Foreigners Everywhere”, the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, with her project “Personal Accounts”.

Official description: Gabrielle Goliath’s immersive installations and performances examine frameworks of inequality and oppression, highlighting how these conditions may be transformed. Personal Accounts (2024) is an ongoing transnational project initiated in 2014, carried out in cities from Johannesburg to Como and Edinburgh. It employs video and sound to create installations that address the global normativity of patriarchal violence. The project records the testimonies of black, brown, indigenous, femme, queer, non-binary, and trans individuals. Each account unveils everyday structures that preserve patriarchal, racializing and colonial orders. These stories deal with violence and trauma. But they also shed light on the “creative and fugitive ways in which survivors assert life and possibility”, which she reframes as strategies for survival and repair. In a deliberate decision made with collaborators’ consent, the sound of words in the video recordings is withheld. Goliath emphasizes paralinguistic elements such as breaths and swallows. This artistic gesture challenges the norms of ‘legibility’ and ‘believability’ typically associated with such accounts; it creates a supportive environment and encourages a space of understanding and compassion. Troubling the false dichotomy of ‘voice’ and ‘voicelessness’, she focuses on collective and embodied ways of listening. This is the first time the work of Gabrielle Goliath is presented at Biennale Arte.

—Tandanzani Dhlakama

Gabrielle Goliath: Personal Accounts (2024) / Venice Art Biennale 2024. Venice (Italy), April 17, 2024.