Gabrielle

Goliath:

Working

in

Trauma’s

Wake

The South African artist’s works – a highlight at last year’s Venice Biennale – seek to reframe acts of mourning and of remembrance.

In 2010, South African artist Gabrielle Goliath created the photographic portrait series Berenice 10–28 (2010), inviting 19 women to stand in for the artist’s childhood friend, who had been killed in an act of domestic violence on Christmas Eve, 1991, in Kimberly, where Goliath was born. Each portrait represented one year since Berenice’s death, with Goliath later inviting another group of women to produce Berenice 29–39, in 2022. The project forms an anchor point in Goliath’s expansive, multimedia practice: a sustained and careful exploration of what she has described as “the problematic of the representation of violence in art”, and the question of how to speak against racialised, sexualised and gendered violence without retraumatising, fetishising or objectifying survivors.