Gabrielle Goliath

“Goliath’s practice is grounded in that recovery, with works that test how art can create space for trauma to unfold and unfurl – to be worked through relationally, laterally, personally – in the name of restoration through recognition. That is, to hold space for witnessing as much as to bear witness; not through language nor the intellectualisation of the horrors of systemic violence, but through the complex web of emotions and states that define its ever-shifting and far-reaching textures, both within the body and without.”

Stephanie Bailey,
Art Review read

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“If photography marks a world available to capture - and if that ‘world’ is, as Denise Ferreira da Silva and Rizvanah Bradley contend, “a thoroughly aesthetic conceit”,* modelled on a racial-sexual regime of differentially valued life - then each of these images (as performed invocations of Berenice) mark a refusal, and more besides. For these are not photographs taken, but gifts - offerings of presence, as each collaborator steps into this space of negation and loss, to tenderly and tenuously reaffirm black girlhood as loveable, grievable, and, despite the relentless recycling of conditions to the contrary, unavailable to this total capture.” - Gabrielle Goliath, MoMA Forum on Contemporary Photography: Lines of Belonging

* Bradley, R. and Silva, D. 2021. Four theses on aesthetics, Journal #120. Available at: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/120/416146/four-theses-on-aesthetics/ (Accessed: 31 August 2023)

Image credit:
Berenice 40-42, 2025, series of 3 photographic portraits, pigment ink on cotton Baryta, 105,5x66,5cm (detail: right panel)