Gabrielle Goliath

Berenice

photographic life-work
2010-

“Berenice, a name spoken over me, into me, never to be mine, and yet mine and of my heart – to be borne, as part of me and to be shared…

On Christmas eve 1991, news came of a not-so-silent night. Berenice, my childhood friend, was dead; shot at home in what was spoken of after – when spoken of at all – as a ‘domestic incident’. The next day, my mother took me over to their house to share our condolences with the family. On seeing me her mother hailed me, calling out a name – not “Gabrielle”, but “Berenice” – and then held me so tight and for so long.”

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Berenice (2010- ) is an ongoing commemorative photographic series invoking the absent presence of Berenice. The first series of images, Berenice 10-28, was produced in Johannesburg in 2010. In numbered, monochromatic stills, nineteen brown women of similar age offer themselves as surrogate presences - ‘standing in’ for Berenice, as each of them marks another year unlived.

A decade later in the making, Berenice 29-39 (2022) reanimates this “life work of mourning”, this time in colour. Occupying a spectral field of pink and purple hues, the collaborating sitters present an expanded community of peers – artists, writers, musicians, activists, mothers, friends - older now, but still bearing this name as a collective work of refusal.

In each series, the artist herself participates. In Berenice 40-42 (debuting late 2025 at Goodman Gallery, New York) she is joined by art historian Nicola Somma who occupies the central frame of this larger-scale photographic triptych, accompanied by her daughters Luciana and Aurelia. To her right stands writer and public intellectual Jamil Khan, transgressing lines of assigned sex and gender identity within this shared labour of loving recall.

In the years ahead, Goliath will be travelling with a treasured Mamiya RB 67, returning to film as she enters the intimate spaces of black, brown, femme, queer and trans collaborators within and beyond South Africa – asking of herself, her community, and those who come to these images, what it means to bear this name: Berenice.

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“For we cannot imagine and seek to realise a world otherwise, if we fail to bear with us those lost to or still surviving an order of violence we hope to – and must – transform.”