• Elegy
    • About
    • Three suites (Venice, 2026)
    • 10-channel installation (2024)
    • Performances (2015-2026)
    • Noluvo Swelindawo (portraits)
  • Bearing
  • Personal Accounts
    • About
    • The Giving Tree
    • a quiet rush
    • Mango Blossoms
    • Lago di Como
    • Salle d'écoute
    • Deinde Falase
    • There's a river...
  • Berenice
  • Beloved
  • These three remain
  • Chorus
  • This song is for...
    • This song is for...
    • This song is for... vol 1
  • Faces of people who...
  • Roulette
  • Stumbling Block
  • Galleria Raffaella Cortese
  • Studio Goliath
  • Menu

Gabrielle Goliath

  • Elegy
    • About
    • Three suites (Venice, 2026)
    • 10-channel installation (2024)
    • Performances (2015-2026)
    • Noluvo Swelindawo (portraits)
  • Bearing
  • Personal Accounts
    • About
    • The Giving Tree
    • a quiet rush
    • Mango Blossoms
    • Lago di Como
    • Salle d'écoute
    • Deinde Falase
    • There's a river...
  • Berenice
  • Beloved
  • These three remain
  • Chorus
  • This song is for...
    • This song is for...
    • This song is for... vol 1
  • Faces of people who...
  • Roulette
  • Stumbling Block
  • Galleria Raffaella Cortese
  • Studio 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

…

“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

…

“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

…

“…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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Statement, 18 Feb 2026

As the selected artist-curator team, we are profoundly disappointed by Justice Kubushi’s ruling. Our application was dismissed with no reasons given at this stage. The judge dismissed the application in two sentences, and a full week after hearing argument (on the afternoon of the Venice Biennale’s submission deadline for National Pavilion exhibition plans). It was also a shock to learn that she has ordered us to pay costs of the application, including costs of a senior and junior counsel. These are punitive measures, enacted against those the Department of Sport, Arts and Culture (DSAC) is mandated to support, and will certainly discourage others in the arts community from attempting to defend their constitutional rights in court.

We believe this ruling sets a dangerous precedent, jeopardising the rights of artists, curators and creatives in South Africa to freedom of expression – freedom to dissent. It goes without saying that we will be contesting this ruling through an appeal.

We are grateful to our legal team, and to all those who have encouraged us and mobilised on our behalf. We ask that you continue to journey with us, as, in the spirit of Elegy, we refuse conditions of disregard and dare to think and dream the world differently.

- Gabrielle Goliath, Ingrid Masondo & James Macdonald