Frostic School of Art

Visiting Artist: Gabrielle Goliath

Artist Lecture
Richmond Center for Visual Arts
Thursday, September 15, room 2008 at 5:30 p.m.

Performance: Elegy by Gabrielle Goliath
Richmond Center for Visual Arts Atrium
Friday, September 16 at 5:30 p.m.

Gabrielle Goliath was born in Kimberley, South Africa, in 1983. She earned an MAFA and BAFA from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Her work has been featured in three solo exhibitions in Johannesburg at Nirox at Arts on Main, Circa and Gallery Momo, and at Goodman Gallery in Cape Town.

Goliath has also exhibited extensively in local group exhibitions including Alterating Conditions: Performing Performance Art in South Africa at Goodman Gallery, Goethe on Main & the Bag Factory, Transformations: Women’s Art from the Late 19th Century at the Johannesburg Art Gallery and SPace at Museum Africa. Internationally, her work has been featured at the Dak’Art Biennale and Photoville, the Tierney Fellowship Exhibit in New York in 2012, and Between the Lines at the Former Tagesspiegel Building in Berlin in 2013. She is a recipient of the Tierney Fellowship Award, the Brait Everard Read Award (2007) and the Wits Martienssen Prize. Her work is represented in the collections of the Iziko South African National Gallery and the Johannesburg Art Gallery, as well as in various academic, private, and corporate collections.

Elegy performance announcement:

A commemorative gesture, Elegy calls together a group of female vocal performers, who collectively enact a ritual of mourning. Durational and physically taxing, the performance sustains a kind of sung cry – evoking, in a symbolic sense, the “presence” of an absent individual. Responding to situations of extreme violence perpetrated against women in South Africa, Elegy recalls the identity of individuals whose subjectivities have been fundamentally violated – and who, as such, are all too easily consigned to a generic, all-encompassing victimhood.  Funding for this exhibition performance is generously provided by the Provost’s Visiting Scholars and Artists Program, and the Gwen Frostic School of Art at Western Michigan University.

http://gabriellegoliath.com