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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Elegy

ongoing performance project
2015-2026

Gabrielle Goliath_Elegy - for two ancestors_2024_performance_La Biennale di Venezia_Sale d’Armi_Venice_photo by J Macdonald_10.JPG

Gabrielle Goliath_Elegy - for two ancestors_2024_performance_La Biennale di Venezia_Sale d’Armi_Venice_photo by J Macdonald_9.JPG

Gabrielle Goliath_Elegy - for two ancestors_2024_performance_La Biennale di Venezia_Sale d’Armi_Venice_photo by J Macdonald_11.JPG

Elegy is a life-work of mourning.
It is a cry, a lament, a tender refrain of remembrance, repair and black feminist love.

For over a decade now, Gabrielle Goliath has staged performances of Elegy across South Africa and the world, invoking the absent presence of women and LGBTIQ+ people lost to fatal acts of racial-sexual violence. In each performance, a group of seven women singers enact a ritual of mourning, collectively sustaining a single, haunting tone for the course of an hour. As one singer falters, another steps up to pick up the note, and so it continues, a cyclic threading of shared breath and voice.

Each performance of Elegy is accompanied by a eulogistic text, scripted by a family member or friend of the individual commemorated: for Sinoxolo, Koketso, Noluvo, Lerato, Kerabo, and more… Other performances address historical cases of violence against women and otherwise-feminised bodies in colonial and slaveocratic contexts. For these, speculative texts by collaborating scholars reach across generations, geographies and archival erasures, recalling these ‘past’ losses and accounting for a present of anti-black, anti-femme violence.

Refusing spectacle and the objectification of bodies deemed rapeable and killable, Elegy asserts conditions of hope and avowal: affirming black, brown, indigenous, femme, queer and trans lives as loveable and grieveable. It is a work of regard, of specificity and care. For those immersed in its sonic vigil, it offers a space for shared grief and radical refusal - for the urgent, ongoing life-work of mourning.

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Performances to-date:

Elegy - Ipeleng Christine Moholane, Goodman Gallery, Cape Town, 2015
Elegy - Sinoxolo Mafevuka, Langa Methodist Church, Cape Town, 2016
Elegy - Koketso ‘Queen’, Richmond Art Centre Atrium, Western Michigan University, 2016
Elegy - Noluvo Swelindawo, ICA Live Art Festival, Youngblood, Cape Town 2017
Elegy - Lekita Moore, Duke University, Durham, 2017
Elegy - Lerato ‘Tambai’ Moloi, Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town, 2017
Elegy - Camron Britz, Spielart Festival, Munich, 2017
Elegy - Hannah Cornelius, Spielart Festival, Munich, 2017
Elegy - Karabo Mokoena, The Holocaust and Genocide Centre, Johannesburg, 2017
Elegy - Joan Thabeng, Do Disturb Festival, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2018
Elegy - Joan Thabeng, National Arts Festival, Makhanda, 2018
Elegy - Sizakele Sigasa and Salome Masooa, Verbo Performance Art Festival, Saõ Paulo, 2018
Elegy - Eunice Nthombifuthi Dube, Centre for the Less Good Idea, Johannesburg, 2018
Elegy - Louisa van de Caab, Ikizo Slave Lodge, Cape Town, 2018
Elegy - Kagiso Maema, Theatre of Vulnerability (It's the Real Thing Performance Art Festival), Basel, 2019
Elegy - Cornelia van Piloane, Afrovibes Festival, Amsterdam & Rotterdam, 2019
Elegy - for two ancestors, La Biennale di Venezia, Stranieri Ovunque - Foreigners Everywhere, 2024
Elegy - Ipeleng Christine Moholane, Hiddingh Hall, Institute for Creative Arts (ICA), Cape Town, 2025
Elegy - for a poet, Star Theatre, Homecoming Centre, District Six, Cape Town, 2026

documentation (select performances)
performances archive (request access)