The

Artists

Confronting

Sexual

Violence

Laia Abril, Gabrielle Goliath and Lydia Pettit amplify the voices of survivors – and challenge the narratives that silence them.

Gabrielle Goliath’s series ‘Personal Accounts’ (2024–ongoing) similarly confronts the colonial and patriarchal structures that enable mass violence. The South African artist’s videos present personal accounts of survivors in Johannesburg, Tunisia, Milan and beyond. In these works words are withheld, leaving only the sounds in between – inhalations, murmurs and throat clears – highlighting how believability is often unfairly tethered to verbal testimony. While many of Goliath’s collaborators have experienced sexual violence, the project also addresses racial and systemic violence, and the entanglement that connects all three.

‘South Africa contends with particularly high levels of rape culture, but I am very careful to frame that,’ she tells me. ‘What are the historical conditions that make this possible? You go to the archive and there is no account of rape, of sexual violence.’ She points to imperialism and slavery as the origin of this silence. The project focuses on her collaborators’ lives now; this, she says, is ‘not a work of violence, but a work of survival’. Changing the ingrained systems of victim blaming, Goliath asserts, means ‘dismantling the white, patriarchal structures and world order that make Black, trans, femme, Indigenous lives far more precarious and vulnerable to violence, disposability, not being believed’.