Gabrielle Goliath - Artist Talk

Thursday 24 June, 6pm

Gabrielle Goliath. This song is for…2019, film still
Gabrielle Goliath. This song is for…2019, film still. Courtesy of the artist and Goodman Gallery

Gabrielle Goliath’s This song is for… presents an opportunity for participants to reflect on the de-subjectifying violence of rape, whilst foregrounding personal and political claims to life, dignity, hope, faith, even joy. 

This talk provides an opportunity to hear Goliath reflect on the development of this work – which is at the heart of The Normal ­­– and her broader artistic practice. Speaking with, alongside and from the work, she will reflect on two key concepts, or sites of encounter: the scratch and the rhapsodic. From these sites, and in broaching the incommensurate experience and afterlives of rape, she will reflect on the limits (or failure) of representation in relation to traumatised black, brown, femme and queer bodies; the politics of difference and bearing that mark our relation to the suffering of others; and the possibility of convening alternative and potentially transformative aesthetic encounters. 

In the words of her recent interview with The Guardian, this engagement will ask those present to respond, personally and self-reflexively, to “a history that commodifies bodies and continues to render many individuals still precarious today – and that demands an accounting of racial slavery, colonialism and apartheid, and the ways in which bodies continue, even now, to be differentially valued.”

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