Season 4: Episode 2 - Gabrielle Goliath

The ICA Podcast

Welcome to Season 4 of the ICA podcast, where we interview artists and curators who perform and curate live interdisciplinary works.

Our second episode features an interview with internationally renowned artist Gabrielle Goliath provides rare and compelling insight into the research and creation of her monumental and acclaimed work Elegy, which had one of its first iterations at the ICA Live Art Festival in 2017 .

Elegy is a long-term commemorative performance initiated by Goliath in 2015. Staged in various locations, each performance calls together a group of female vocal performers who collectively enact a ritual of mourning, sustaining a single haunting tone over the course of an hour.

Responding to the physical, ontological and structural outworking(s) of rape-culture in South Africa, Elegy performances invoke the absent presence of individuals whose subjectivities have been fundamentally violated, and who are all too easily consigned to a generic, all-encompassing victimhood. Each performance commemorates a named, loved and missed woman or LGBTIQ+ individual subjected to fatal acts of gendered and sexualised violence.

Significant to the work is how loss becomes a site for community, and for empathetic encounters with and across difference. Refusing the symbolic violence through which traumatised black, brown, femme and queer bodies are routinely objectified, Elegy performances open an alternative, relational space, wherein mourning is presented as a social and politically productive work, not in the sense of healing or closure but as a necessary and sustained irresolution.

Season 4 of the ICA Podcast comprise interviews conducted by Nkgopoleng Moloi and produced by Atiyyah Khan.

This is an initiative created by the Institute for Creative Arts which is based at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Thank you for listening.