Gabrielle Goliath

“The single note in Elegy is equal parts clarion call and durational rejection of mourning’s expected temporality. The performativity of Goliath’s practice lies in its metabolic urgency: its response to the necrographic commitment to one another, and to the dead whose memory comprises the shared memorial responsibility of the living.”

Zoé Samudzi
Mousse Magazine

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“Elegy is an artwork that gives us space to grieve. Grieving is reparative work. It is reflective work. It is where we may continue to love and long for what, really, cannot be repaired.”

M. Neelika Jayawardane
MOMUS

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“Collective grief, Goliath seems to propose in this body of work, is a necessary tool for building solidarity — it constitutes a collective action, a precarious coalition of grievers, an impetus for change. How many revolutions have begun at a funeral? And, perhaps even more pointedly, how many atrocities have only deepened because of our failure to mourn?”

Aruna D’Souza
Hyperallergic

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“…Elegy is severe in its economy: seven voices, a single sustained note, one hour … This restraint could itself be seen as an ethical position, a refusal to aestheticise pain or produce the kind of spectacular image of suffering that gets consumed and then forgotten.”

Joyce Joumaa
ArtReview

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Bearing

2025-

In Bearing, Gabrielle Goliath channels black, brown, femme, queer and trans bodies that bear the world.

How is it that these bodies carry, birth and service a world from which they are nevertheless excluded? In a white heteropatriarchal regime of representation, these bodies pose a problem, embody a threshold: abject, deviant and available to violence. And yet, for all this, they have a bearing: holding themselves together, holding themselves beautifully, holding each other...

In the sensuous materiality of oils, watercolours, pastels and paper, the artist summons the dark radiance and dissident desires of black feminist and queer erotics, claiming tenderness, intimacy, pleasure and love.

caption: Gabrielle Goliath, Kefiloe, 2026, oil paint on canvas, 160 x 110cm

installation views