‘I’m

broken

and

my

only

sin

was

being

a

woman’

–

Gabrielle

Goliath’s

survivors

The South African artist’s latest installation asks sexual violence survivors to choose a song to articulate their agony.

The event that shaped Gabrielle Goliath’s life as an artist happened when she was nine years old: a schoolfriend was killed in an act of domestic violence, the details of which have never been clear. “It would have been an accident,” she says, from her home in Johannesburg, 30 years on. “But, you know, when these things happen within a family, no one outside of those four walls knows exactly what went on.” She commemorated her friend in a 2010 photographic work, Berenice 10-28, which invited 19 young black women – so-called “surrogates” – to sit for a portrait, each representing one of the 19 years that Berenice had missed.

The work that brings the South African artist to Edinburgh is another powerful act of remembrance, this time focused on the survivors of assault. This Song Is For … is the centrepiece, and emotional core, of The Normal, the reopening show at the university’s Talbot Rice Gallery. It bends the idea of the dedication song into a reflection on the worldwide problem of sexual violence against women and those who don’t conform to gender norms, through the testimonies of five individuals.