Gabrielle Goliath

When the Pinchuk Art Centre invited me to produce a new cycle of Personal Accounts in Kyiv, I thought a lot about what it would mean to foreground feminist and queer practices of survival within a context of war.

How could I address the pervasive threat of a full-scale Russian invasion - of dispossession, internment, rape and death - without disregarding conditions of misogyny, queer/trans-phobia and sexualised violence within Ukrainian society as well?

With the support of Insight (Ukraine) and the LGBTIQ+ Military, eleven woman-identifying, queer and trans collaborators responded to my invitation, sharing accounts of violence experienced within the sustained crisis of Russian invasion, but also within family, church and military contexts, and even within the LGBTIQ+ community. What emerges in the shared breath and presence of these personal accounts is a sonic tapestry of intersecting life narratives, tracing practices of survival, care, and the ongoing struggle for a free Ukraine in which feminist and queer love, life and imagination can flourish.

As with other cycles of Personal Accounts, the spoken words of the accounts are withheld. This is not redaction or erasure, but a collective decision of care. In the in-between spaces of ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’ - of sighing and crying, sometimes laughing - these tender accounts trouble the measures of ‘believability’ and ‘credibility’ that so readily undermine the testimony of survivors, and offer us instead a different, more embodied, survivor-centric way of coming to know, hear and recognise each other.