Elegy

Developed over more than a decade as a ritual performance and installation project, Gabrielle Goliath’s Elegy (2015–ongoing) gathers collective acts of mourning around lives and histories marked by violence, erasure and structural loss. 

Elegy has evolved through multiple geographies and communities, with performative encounters staged across Johannesburg, Cape Town, São Paulo, Paris, Amsterdam, Munich and beyond. 

The work arrives in London for a major institutional presentation, following the shocking cancellation of the South African Pavilion in Venice and its subsequent presentation as an independent exhibition at Chiesa di Sant’Antonin, with the support of Ibraaz, the Bertha Foundation and other allies.  

Installed in the sonic chamber of Ibraaz's Minassa, voices and moving images immerse audiences within a space of mourning, kinship and collective care. Addressing contexts of rape culture and femicide in South Africa, the genocide of Ovaherero and Nama peoples in Namibia and the ongoing devastation of Palestinian life, Elegy proposes mourning not as closure, but as a sustained practice of collective presence.