Gabrielle Goliath
This song is for… Vol.1
Work from the Frac Bretagne collection acquired in 2022
Presented as an interactive listening room, This song is for… vol 1 is a unique collection of six vinyl records, drawn from the artist’s multi-channel video and sound installation, This song is for… (2019). In this more intimate context, the tactile, interactive form of the records engenders a different kind of listening experience, in which rituals of care attend and grant reverence to the sonic experience.
In This song is for… Goliath returns to and re-performs the popular convention of the dedication song, in collaboration with a group of women and gender-queer led musical ensembles. Each of the eleven songs (six of which are included here) were personally chosen by a survivor of rape and subsequently performed as a newly produced cover-version. These are songs of special significance to the survivors, songs that transport them back to a particular time and place, evoking a sensory world of memory and feeling.
A sonic disruption is introduced at a point within each song, recalling the ‘broken record’ effect of a scratched vinyl LP. Presented in this performed musical rupture is an opportunity for listeners to affectively inhabit a contested space of traumatic recall – one in which the de-subjectifying violence of rape and its psychic afterlives become painfully entangled with personal and political claims to life, dignity, hope, faith, even joy.
THE ARTIST
Born in 1983 in Kimberley (South Africa).
Lives and works in Johannesburg.
Through the ritual, sonic and social encounters of her art practice, Gabrielle Goliath attends (and tends) to histories and present-day conditions of differentially valued life, reaffirming ways in which black, brown, femme and queer practices of possibility perform the world differently. Each of her works convenes a coming-to – a tenuous community – collapsing the presumed remove and privileged subject position of representation (as white, male, heteronormative) and calling for meetings in and across difference, on terms of complicity, relation and love.
+ Download the exhibition guide
+ The texts of the installation are available here
Image : Gabrielle Goliath, This song is for… Vol 1, 2021 (détail) Collection Frac Bretagne
© Gabrielle Goliath – Photo Courtesy Goodman Gallery