Personal Accounts. A solo exhibition by Gabrielle Goliath
Gabrielle Goliath’s Personal Accounts is an ongoing, deeply moving video installation in which collaborating women and gender-diverse survivors share personal stories of patriarchal violence.
Unfolding across different geographies and political landscapes, its most recent chapter, a quiet rush, was filmed in Ukraine in March 2025, amid the full-scale war. It is presented alongside earlier chapters recorded in South Africa, Italy, and Scotland.
Through the ritual, sonic and social encounters of her practice, Gabrielle Goliath attends (and tends) to histories and present-day conditions of differentially valued life, reaffirming ways in which black, brown, femme and queer practices perform the world differently. Her work troubles a racial/sexual regime of representation, calling for meetings in and across difference, on terms of complicity, relation and love.
She has received several awards, including the Future Generation Art Prize – Special Prize (2019), Standard Bank Young Artist Award (2019), and Institut Français, Afrique en créations Prize at the Bamako Biennale (2017). Her work is held in collections such as MoMA, Tate Modern, Kunsthalle Zürich, Mudam Luxembourg, Frac Bretagne, and Iziko South African National Gallery. She lives and works in Johannesburg.
In each location, Goliath creates a space of care – an environment shaped by presence, consent, and emotional resonance. Her work doesn’t seek to display trauma but to honour the agency of those who have lived through it. Participants – women, queer, trans, and non-binary individuals – were invited to share not only their stories, but their silences, gestures, and breath. Visitors are extended the opportunity to take time with these personal accounts, accessing further layers of what is shared and withheld in each offering through QR codes. The space shaped by the installation encourages a situation of communal witnessing, in which proximity, vulnerability and listening become active forms of solidarity.
The Kyiv chapter holds a unique urgency. Created during wartime and in collaboration with Ukrainian human rights NGOs and activists, a quiet rush becomes a powerful reminder: even as the country fights for its territorial integrity, we must also give attention to challenges beyond the immediate defence of the country – individual freedoms, enduring values of dignity, inclusivity, and attentiveness to each life. While living through an existential challenge, this work offers a quiet, radical proposition: that tenderness is a form of resistance, and that healing can be a collective gesture.
“When the Pinchuk Art Centre invited me to produce a new cycle of Personal Accounts in Kyiv, I thought a lot about what it would mean to foreground feminist and queer practices of survival within a context of war.
How could I address the pervasive threat of a full-scale Russian invasion – of dispossession, internment, rape and death – without disregarding conditions of misogyny, queer/trans-phobia and sexualised violence within Ukrainian society as well?
With the support of Insight (Ukraine) and the LGBTIQ+ Military, eleven woman-identifying, queer and trans collaborators responded to my invitation, sharing accounts of violence experienced within the sustained crisis of Russian invasion, but also within family, church and military contexts, and even within the LGBTIQ+ community. What emerges in the shared breath and presence of these personal accounts is a sonic tapestry of intersecting life narratives, tracing practices of survival, care, and the ongoing struggle for a free Ukraine in which feminist and queer love, life and imagination can flourish.
As with other cycles of Personal Accounts, the spoken words of the accounts are withheld. This is not redaction or erasure, but a collective decision of care. In the in-between spaces of ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’ – of sighing and crying, sometimes laughing – these tender accounts trouble the measures of ‘believability’ and ‘credibility’ that so readily undermine the testimony of survivors, and offer us instead a different, more embodied, survivor-centric way of coming to know, hear and recognise each other.”
This exhibition includes six cycles of Personal Accounts, produced in Kyiv, Edinburgh, Como and Johannesburg. Each of the cycles address particular contexts of patriarchal violence, as well as ways in which black, brown, femme, queer and trans individual survive, and cultivate conditions in which to thrive. Click here to learn more about the different cycles.
Survivor Offerings
In addition to what is presented (and withheld) in the installation itself, collaborators in Personal Accounts sometimes choose to share supplementary offerings which are made available online. These offerings may include reflections on experiences of violence or practices of survival and wellbeing, such as prayers, poems, playlists, recipes, photographs or artworks. Click here to view offerings shared by collaborators who joined Gabrielle in Kyiv for the production of Personal Accounts – a quiet rush.
The cycles included in the PAC show are:
As a well-known news anchor at the Nigerian Television Authority in Abuja, it fell to Deinde Falase to publicly announce the Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Bill, signed into law by President Goodluck Jonathan on January 7, 2014. In addition to criminalising same-sex marriage, the bill further imposed a 10-year prison sentence on individuals engaging in or ‘making a show’ of same-sex amorous relationships, as well as those frequenting gay clubs or associating with organisations or societies supportive of gay rights.
Shortly after the announcement, Deinde left Nigeria for South Africa, where the rights of LGBTIQ+ people are constitutionally enshrined. Ten years later, however, he is still an asylum seeker without a work permit, unable to find employment despite his credentials, which include a Masters Degree from the University of Leeds. Failed by yet another state, the precarity of his experience is heightened by the everyday threat of Afrophobic and homophobic violence in South Africa.
Deinde’s account is shared in three parts. In the centre panel he addresses his beloved mother, who died before he felt able to fully disclose his sexual identity, and whose funeral in Nigeria he was unable to attend. The account to the right is directed towards his supportive elder brother who lives in the USA, and to the left, his younger brother in Nigeria who has all but disowned him.
Personal Accounts – Deinde Falase https://www.gabriellegoliath.com/deinde-falase
Lake Como is beautiful, wealthy people retire there. It’s the north Italian idyll: lakes, mountains, villas, wine, food, lifestyle.
It is also a place of fugitive arrivals and departures – of tentative community, precarious labour and unbelonging. Cutting across differential hierarchies of race, culture, privilege and legal status, patriarchy draws a fault line, marking feminised lives as available to violence and subjecting survivors to (further) social and political invalidation.
Every year, the Como branch of Telefona Donna responds to over 250 new cases of gendered violence and sexual assault, offering psycho-social support, legal counsel and love to women in distress. Shared in this cycle of Personal Accounts are the difficulties, hopes and asserted life practices of nine survivors: artists, writers, cleaners, mothers, entrepreneurs. For some this is home, for others yet another making of it, having arrived in Lombardy (for so many reasons) from Senegal, Morocco, Brazil, Ukraine, Bangladesh, Albania and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Connecting this tight Telefona Donna community – across their many differences – is not the ‘common bond’ and social inscription of ‘victimhood’, but the nourishment, affection, solidarity and joy through which they exceed it.
Como is beautiful. Made beautiful in these quotidian offerings of arrival, transition, home-making and repair: in Zohra’s prayers, in Diarra’s bar, in Ecaterina’s photo book, and in the fragile remains of what these personal accounts choose to reveal and withhold.
Personal Accounts – Lago di Como https://www.gabriellegoliath.com/lago-di-como
The Giving Tree’ is Adila Hassim’s favourite children’s story. She read it to her children again and again. The tree loves a child and gives all she has to enable their happiness: leaves, apples, branches, trunk, stump – everything.
What is the demand of a more liveable and loving world? What does it ask of us if not everything? Preeminent black African feminist writer Professor Pumla Dineo Gqola lives by a dictum: to never invoke the violence of rape culture and femicide without simultaneously, “gesturing towards its unmaking”. For Arya Lalloo, filmmaking and activism coalesce in a radical praxis of storytelling – of tending to lives lived and lost in the wake of slavery, colonialism and apartheid. Human rights lawyer, Advocate Adila Hassim, works to realise the more liveable, loving world she imagines for her children, embodying this ethos in the slow juridical labour of defending lives rendered precarious, from abandoned mental health patients in South Africa to a civilian population under siege in Gaza.
Unmaking the world, imagining it differently. It is for these women, these mothers, the difficult, life-giving labour of giving and exceeding this everything.
Personal Accounts – The Giving Tree https://www.gabriellegoliath.com/salle-dcoute
Survival is mango blossoms, memory, starry skies, friendships (imperfect), dancing in the rain, going to art school, essential oils (pine scented), finishing a degree, keeping the faith, disbelieving in god, lost in the cosmos, found in journaling, poetry, remembering, (not) forgiving, refusing, rerouting, re-learning to love (or not), choosing transition, transcendence, a house boat commune, channelling Haifa Wehbe. It is more than one thing (victimhood), one angle (scrutiny), one account (continuity = credibility), one timeline (healing).
Gathered in this cycle of eleven accounts is a tenuous community of immigrants, activists, students, survivors– based in, from, or passing through Edinburgh. In dual video accounts they map out experiences of misogyny, racism and rape; of harassment and disregard; of state, church and familial cultures of violence and disavowal that actively undermine black, brown, femme, queer and trans wellbeing.
Some collaborators reveal their names, show their faces, claim visibility. Others appear differently, for reasons of self-care, safety and/or wilful opacity. What is shared between them is something of what survival looks, feels and sounds like, and what it means, in the words of a collaborator who chooses to withhold her name, “to navigate your life with love, courage and wisdom”.
Personal Accounts – Mango Blossoms https://www.gabriellegoliath.com/mango-blossoms
The title of this 4-channel cycle is taken from a liturgy scripted, composed and performed for the occasion by artist, activist and House of Diamonds mother, Treyvone Moo.
There’s a river of birds in migration
A nation of women with wings
A river of birds in migration
A nation of mothers who sing
Treyvone is joined by Maneo, Sapphire and Hopewell, who together share personal accounts of trans precarity and survival in Johannesburg, South Africa. In a crisis norm of anti-black, anti-femme, homophobic and transphobic violence, trauma is everyday and everywhere. Nevertheless, these personal accounts exceed the conditions of negation from which they are spoken, read and sung. Asserted alongside grief, disappointment, fears and losses are hope, creativity, beauty, community, poetry, desire, generosity, faith, transition, love and, perhaps most emphatically, presence.
Personal Accounts – There’s a river of birds in migration https://www.gabriellegoliath.com/theres-a-river
Curators: Björn Geldhof, Oleksandra Pohrebniak