Kunsthaus Baselland
13.05 - 17.07.2022
“Frauenstreik,” Switzerland’s annual women’s march took place on 14 June 22, two days before I visited Gabrielle Goliath’s This song is for … at Kunstmuseum Baselland. The streets were awash in purple, flags aloft and anger resonant as thousands protested gender inequality. The first Frauenstreik happened in June 1991, when Swiss women stopped working to demonstrate the nation’s dependency on women’s work.
That same year in South Africa, Goliath’s childhood friend, Berenice, was shot dead in what was spoken of – when spoken of at all – as a ‘domestic incident.’
50 years after the introduction of women’s suffrage in Switzerland, women inter, non-binary and trans people continue to work more often than men in low-wage sectors, for lower wages and with less job security. Some of the practical developments protested by women included recent backward steps in equality policy, like a judgment which ruled that mothers no longer have an automatic right to personal maintenance after a divorce and the “AHV21” reform, which includes an increase in the retirement age for women.
As a South African, it can be difficult to reconcile Swiss struggles for economic gender equality with the fight for life at home. I have written elsewhere about how disorienting Switzerland is compared to South Africa; I left home in September 2019, in the wake of nationwide protest for Uyinene Mrwetyana, a 19-year-old student who was brutally raped and murdered at a post office in Cape Town on 24 August 2019. And to paraphrase Lindokuhle Nkosi once again, numbers can’t articulate the continuous violent acts against bodies. “How to speak about the continuous violent acts against women? There is no justice in statistics.”
Gabrielle Goliath, This song is for…, 2019, 2022. Courtesy of the artist, Goodman Gallery and Kunsthaus Baselland. Photography by Gina Folly.
Though there is grace, there is also no justice leaving my home country-in-mourning to arrive in another where walking alone at night is not considered a luxury reserved for men. Which is not to say that gender-based violence does not happen Switzerland (it happens everywhere), but crime in this country is almost unheard of. Again, this is not to say that there is no culture of violence but there it is not public, normalised, deadly. There is no cruel colonial and apartheid inheritance ravaging across the gender spectrum.
I walked through that sea of purple fury, fighting for equality, and looked for people who looked like me. There were few, but they were there. One held a sign that said: “FEMINISM WITHOUT INTERSECTIONALITY IS JUST WHITE SUPREMACY.” We grinned at each other.
At Goliath’s exhibition, everyone looked like me.
On one side of the room, “nineteen brown women offer themselves as surrogate presences, ‘standing in’ for Berenice.” The monochrome photographs could be passport photos, comp cards, or missing persons posters.
The text on the wall read:
”Berenice”, a name spoken over me, into me, never to be mine, and yet mine and of my heart = to be borne, as part of me and to be shared. On Christmas eve 1991, news came of a not-so silent night. Berenice, my childhood friend was dead, shot at home in what was spoken of – when spoken of at all – as a ‘domestic incident’ my mother took me over to their house to share our condolences with Berenice’s mom, who in seeing me, hailed me, calling out a name – not ‘Gabrielle’, but Berenice – and then held me so tight for so long…
In the acknowledged (but nevertheless insistent) failure of this gesture, each sitter marks her absent presence – on portrait for every year unlived, from her death in 1991 to the series realisation in 2020.
On the other side of the room, the series has been revisited, this time in colour, “reanimating its commemorative gesture.”
Gabrielle Goliath, Berenice 29-39, 2022. Courtesy of the artist, Goodman Gallery and Kunsthaus Baselland. Photograph by Gina Folly.
The installation height of the photographs is about my own, creating the sense that I was standing face to face with the women in front of me. Many of the ‘surrogates’ in the series are women that I know. Family, friends, colleagues. My peers.
Like Frauenstreik, Berenice 29-39 (2022) is a purple affair, but more gently so. There are eleven portraits, held by a gamut of soft shades. There is lavender, there is thistle. Up close, some even seem backlit in periwinkle, a colour also known as fiore di morte (flower of death) in Italy where wreaths of the evergreen were commonly laid on the graves of children. Most often, the background seemed to be lilac, traditionally the colour of half-mourning, worn after the period of full mourning had passed, according to Victorian mourning etiquette.
Purple is historically associated with efforts to achieve gender equality, but it is also a recurring feature in Goliath’s aesthetic choices. Take, for instance, This song is for … (2019), a two channel video work featuring women and gender-queer led musical ensembles performing songs chosen by survivors of sexual assault. Each piece is led by a single individual who repeatedly breaks from song into solemn humming. At the same time as the sound swaddles viewers’ senses, the brightly lit purple walls bounce off the warm colours on screen. And so, far from a droll dirge, the work envelops viewers in colour and sound.
Gabrielle Goliath, This song is for…, 2019, 2022. Courtesy of the artist, Goodman Gallery and Kunsthaus Baselland. Photography by Gina Folly.
At an artist talk on 16 June 2022, Goliath explained that, when working with and through this fraught terrain of trauma and domestic violence, she is mindful that a lot of art spectacularises violence. To avoid gratuitous depictions, she turns to the affective – music and colour – her way of dealing with the problematics of violence represented in art.
“You walk into colour. You’re bathed in sound. You’re not assaulted by violence.”
This turn to the affective is both protective and healing – a prophylactic against retraumatising, and a remedy for what Zenzile Khoisan describes as “the purgatory of unprocessed pain.”
Someone in the audience thanked Goliath for allowing viewers to determine for themselves the extent to which they engaged with the texts, written by survivors and printed on the purple walls. She observed that the sound and colour in the exhibition is never invasive. The affective experience is kind to both the viewer and the survivor.
Someone else asked if spirituality factors into her works. Goliath’s response: “Intersectionality holds spirituality, and faith within that.”
Yet another asked if she would have made this series of photographs without a blessing from Berenice’s mother, and Goliath offered a masterclass on consent by recounting the immersive experience of Chorus (2021), where members of the University of Cape Town Choir sound a lament for Uyinene Mrwetyana. This work was presented with the blessing of The Uyinene Mrwetyana Foundation. It would not have been made without it.
Chorus also commemorated the absent presence of four hundred and sixty-three individuals listed on a commemorative roll, “whose lost lives similarly call for the long, collective, and as we must hope, transformative work of mourning.”
Gabrielle Goliath, This song is for…, 2019, 2022. Courtesy of the artist, Goodman Gallery and Kunsthaus Baselland. Photography by Gina Folly.
A more confrontational work, Roulette (2012) took the shape of simple participatory installation in the form of a dare:
A pair of headphones dangle in front of the participant, and one is invited to put them on, despite the welcome mat beneath them that reads, “DISCLAIMER: LISTENING IN MAY RESULT IN SEVERE RINGING OF THE EARS OR EVEN PERMANENT AURAL DAMAGE.” Every six hours the otherwise static silence of the headphones is pierced with the sharp sound of a point blank recording of gunshot: POP.
In 2020, Roulette was showing (without headphones) at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris. This time, the gun sounded every three hours – an update on the rate of femicide in South Africa. Importantly, Goliath is attuned to how “certain kinds of concerns and issues are relegated to certain parts of the world” and urges thinking about this violence across geographical lines and lines of difference through a global, transnational lens.
But back to Berenice. Since the first iteration of the series, and in other works, Goliath has sought to “negotiate, in quite different ways, the trauma and loss associated with gendered/ sexualized violence, as well as the politics of its normalization as rape culture.”
At the talk, Goliath recounted how, after visiting the exhibition, a father approached her to share something that had happened to his child, in Switzerland. At the opening of the exhibition in May, three women shared similar experiences with her. This kind of exchange is “something that the work makes possible.” This labour, this ongoing conversation, this mourning makes it possible to talk about abuse, rape, femicide.
This series, this ongoing “life-work in mourning,” also makes it possible to imagine Berenice. Her presence in the exhibition is not without pain. But, somehow, the miracle of the work is that the spectre of her unlived life, though haunting, does not hurt. The curator of the exhibition, Ines Goldbach, was right in reminding the audience that Goliath’s practice is about life as much as anything.
I am reminded of this quote from Lucia Berlin: “Time stops when someone dies. Of course it stops for them, maybe, but for the mourners time runs amok. Death comes too soon. It forgets the tides, the days growing longer and shorter, the moon. It rips up the calendar.” Goliath tenderly puts it back together, one year at a time.
Gabrielle Goliath, This song is for…, 2019, 2022. Courtesy of the artist, Goodman Gallery and Kunsthaus Baselland. Photography by Gina Folly.
Also in 1991, Herlinder Koelbl began a series of portraits of Angela Merkel for a project called “Traces of Power.” Every year, from 1991 to 1998, Koebl met the same 15 individuals — all people in a position of power — to interview and photograph them. At the beginning of the project, Merkel had just been appointed Minister for Women and Youth. For the next thirty years, Koeble documented Merkel, throughout her chancellorship, taking the same photograph and asking her the same questions. One of them: do you have time to bake plum cake? What would Gabrielle ask Berenice? What would Berenice ask Gabrielle?
Writing about the politics of mourning in performance work by Tracey Rose and Donna Kukama, Goliath asks: “If language falters and inevitably fails in its attempts to articulate the irreducibility of trauma and pain, how do we begin to think about the possibilities of what art can and cannot do?”
For Ashraf Jamal, “Goliath’s choreography of the story of suffering” was designed to be cathartic, but “as Greek tragedy reminds us, catharsis comes after suffering. It can never, finally, expunge it.” Yes, the trauma can never be expunged, no less than the dead can be brought to life but Euripides said: “Bear witness for one who is loved and not loved: we cast the cloak gently around her, an end of great woe.” Nomusa Makhubu joins this chorus of voices affirming both Goliath’s artistic practice and her academic scholarship: “Through processes of mourning, Goliath makes the injustice palpable.”
In the wake of violence so particular to place, and a loss of life so particular to one, Goliath bears witness through Berenice for Berenice, a gift to her and to all who lost her, all who did not get to know her. A gift to all lives lost, for all mourners.
