Gabrielle Goliath’s Personal Accounts is more than an exhibition—it is an emotionally charged, relationally immersive experience that invites viewers to participate in a profound engagement with the complex realities of racial, gendered, and sexual violence. Running from October 26, 2024, to February 15, 2025, this iteration of Personal Accounts marks the latest chapter in Goliath’s transnational, decolonial, black feminist project. Building on previous collaborations in Johannesburg, Tunisia, Oslo, Milan, and Stellenbosch, the exhibition continues to expand its reach, threading together narratives of survival, resilience, and the assertion of life in the face of patriarchal violence.
Born in 1983 in Kimberley, South Africa, Gabrielle Goliath is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice exists at the confluence of art and activism, confronting the entrenched paradigms of racialized and sexualized violence that shape postcolonial and post-apartheid realities. Known for her commitment to decolonial and black feminist principles, Goliath employs sound, video, and performance to create immersive environments that give voice to marginalized communities. Her art is a space where testimony, memory, and collective experience converge—transforming the personal into the political and creating opportunities for collective understanding.
With exhibitions at the 58th Venice Biennale, the 14th Sharjah Biennial, and the 2020 Johannesburg Art Gallery, Goliath’s works have earned recognition for their ability to create dialogue around social justice issues while fostering emotional and ethical engagement. She has also received numerous accolades, including the Future Generation Art Prize – Special Prize (2019), the Standard Bank Young Artist Award (2019), and the Institut Français Afrique en Créations Prize at the Bamako Biennale (2017). Her works are featured in prominent collections such as Kunsthalle Zürich and Tate Modern.
Housed within the University of Edinburgh, Talbot Rice Gallery is a space that champions contemporary art that engages deeply with social, cultural, and political concerns. Known for its commitment to fostering conversations that challenge and expand boundaries, the gallery offers a platform for art that fosters critical discourse and meaningful exchange. Its dedication to showcasing thought-provoking works aligns perfectly with the ethos of Goliath’s Personal Accounts. By partnering with the gallery, Goliath’s work enters a venue known for its capacity to engage audiences intellectually, while also providing them with the space to reflect on emotional and ethical dimensions of art.
The collaboration between Gabrielle Goliath and Talbot Rice Gallery is an ideal fusion of space and vision. The gallery’s commitment to socially engaged art provides the perfect context for Personal Accounts, a work that goes beyond aesthetic enjoyment to challenge viewers to reflect on systemic violence and the conditions of survival. Goliath’s work asks for an active, emotional, and ethical participation in the themes of racial, gendered, and sexual violence, aligning seamlessly with the gallery’s mission of fostering dialogue and engagement with contemporary societal issues.
At the heart of Personal Accounts is an insistence on active participation. Goliath demands more than the passive role of witness from her audience. Her work asks for a relational, ethical, and emotional involvement in which the audience reckons with the everyday conditions that sustain systems of racial and gendered violence. Yet, as Goliath is quick to emphasize, her work is not about violence itself, but rather about celebrating the myriad ways in which black, brown, indigenous, femme, queer, non-binary, and trans individuals survive and thrive under such conditions.
For this cycle in Edinburgh, Goliath has worked closely with the Talbot Rice Gallery team as well as a diverse community of women and gender-diverse individuals from Edinburgh and its surroundings. These collaborators bravely share their personal stories of survival, many of which revisit traumatic experiences of physical, sexual, emotional, and material harm. Others unpack the more subtle, yet equally pervasive, systems of patriarchy that perpetuate the precarity of femme and non-gender-normative lives. Each narrative vividly captures how survivors actively assert life, agency, and possibility, navigating and resisting conditions of negation.
Goliath’s decision to withhold the spoken words of each filmed account is a powerful act of care and recognition. Instead, what remains is a paralinguistic sonic stream—breaths, swallows, sighs, cries, humming, even laughter—that evokes the unspoken, the unsaid, and the sometimes unheard. This sonic abstraction defies the preconditions of ‘legibility’ and ‘believability’ that often undermine the testimonies of survivors. In place of these expectations, Goliath asserts the shared breath and presence of the collaborators, collectively entwined in the gallery space, forging an intimacy and solidarity that is not bound by the conventions of verbal testimony.
In this way, Personal Accounts transcends the boundaries of the gallery, fostering a transnational dialogue of survival and repair. Through this work, Goliath calls for a different kind of relation—one rooted in a politics of love and avowal that does not erase intersectional difference or the unique specificities of each experience. Instead, it embraces a collective, embodied, survivor-centric approach to understanding, hearing, and recognizing one another. It asks viewers to sit with the tension of these embodied stories, to witness not just trauma but also survival, repair, and the assertion of life against all odds.
As with all of Goliath’s work, the experience of Personal Accounts is one that invites reflection on what it means to be human in the face of violence. However, it also offers the possibility of something more—an opportunity for collective healing, for the recognition of shared humanity, and for the affirmation of life even in the most challenging circumstances. While the exhibition offers an overwhelmingly powerful and transformative experience, it is important to note that some of the wall texts in Personal Accounts discuss sexual violence, which may be distressing to some viewers. These wall texts are optional, offering visitors the space to engage with the exhibition on their own terms, should they choose to do so.
In Personal Accounts, Goliath’s art is not just a visual encounter; it is a sonic and relational one, where the unspoken finds voice and the unsaid is asserted in every breath shared in the gallery space. Through this, she asks us to imagine new ways of listening, of witnessing, and of being together in the complexities of the world.
