The US premiere of Gabrielle Goliath’s (South African, b. 1983) acclaimed, video series Personal Accounts (2024–ongoing) responds to the impacts of patriarchal violence in a range of global contexts from Johannesburg to Kyiv. Intimately documenting survivor testimonials, in collaboration with the contributors, the artist has withheld narrative speech within the videos, instead portraying the moments in between participants’ recounts: breaths, sighs, cries, humming, and even laughter. Goliath’s sonic cycles trouble false binaries of the “voiced” and “voiceless,” revealing the enormity of what can be conveyed in moments of perceived silence. The gestures and spaces between words open into a crescendo of communal expression that foregrounds empathetic registers beyond textual meaning.
