In her first solo exhibition in Ukraine, the South African artist collaborates with LGBTQIA+ soldiers and civilians to create a powerful cycle of testimonies that transform survival into an everyday politics of hope.
Gabrielle Goliath, Personal Accounts, 2024-. ‘Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere’, La Biennale di Venezia (2024). Photo: Luc Meneghel
The PinchukArtCentre in Kyiv presents the first solo exhibition in Ukraine by South African artist Gabrielle Goliath. At its centre is ‘a quiet rush’, a new cycle in her ongoing series Personal Accounts, which gathers testimonies from LGBTQIA+ soldiers and civilians living through the dual pressures of war and marginalisation. Working closely with survivors, activists, and community organisations, Goliath creates immersive, sound-based environments that invite visitors into a space of proximity, presence, and relational encounter. In withholding words and instead foregrounding moments of resonance and silence, her work resists conventional frameworks of testimony, shifting attention toward embodied experience and survivor-centred ways of knowing. Goliath discusses building trust with collaborators, the complexities of creating work in Ukraine during war, and how her practice of care, resistance, and mourning finds urgent expression in this context.
Stephan Rheeder: Your new commission at the PinchukArtCentre works with testimonies from LGBTQIA+ soldiers in Ukraine. How did you approach the process of building trust and care with participants living through the dual pressures of war and marginalisation?
Gabrielle Goliath: The title of this new cycle of Personal Accounts – “a quiet rush” – is taken from a poem written by Kafa, one of the collaborating survivors I worked with on the project. Kafa (she/her, they/them) is a poet, queer activist, and drone operator for the Ukrainian military, stationed on the frontline. In this context of war – underscored by endemic conditions of patriarchy and queerphobia – art, activism, and combat entangle as practices of both survival and imagination. Like others in their unit, Kafa is fighting for a free Ukraine—but for them, that freedom must translate into a feminist and queer flourishing. This is key, as from the start this cycle has been an attempt to foreground feminist and queer practices of survival and care within a context of war. When first commissioned by the PinchukArtCentre, I made it clear that producing a cycle of Personal Accounts in Kyiv would need to be a critical undertaking, driven by the decolonial and black feminist politics that are the from where-and-whom of this project. For me, the real question was how to 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. Björn and the PinchukArtCentre team got behind that vision. And this is why, whilst this cycle of eleven accounts does include queer and woman-identifying soldiers, it also includes civilian artists, poets, teachers, writers, models and more. Some have survived internment, torture and rape, on account of the invasion, others are survivors of gendered and sexual violence within family, church and (Ukrainian) military contexts – and even from within local queer communities. And what emerges from the entanglement of these survival practices is, for me, the basis of an everyday politics of hope, as these individuals struggle, in different ways, to realise the kind of freedom Kafa is fighting for, in which feminist and queer love, life and imagination can flourish. As with all cycles of Personal Accounts, this is community work, realised in relation and with mutual accountability. This particular cycle would not have been possible without the partnership and community of the LGBTIQ+ Military, Insight (Ukraine), and the heartfelt commitment of a very femme-centric team at the PinchukArtCentre in Kyiv. But, at the heart of it, are the conversations and exchanges I have had over many months now with eleven extraordinary individuals – these survivors: Daniil, Daria, Daryna, Edward, Emily, Kafa, Max, Pasha, River, Victoria, and a queer woman soldier who chooses to withhold her name.
Gabrielle Goliath, Personal Accounts, 2024-. ‘Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere’, La Biennale di Venezia (2024). Photo: Luc Meneghel
This is your first solo exhibition in Ukraine. How did the local context—social, political, and emotional—shape your conception and presentation of the work within the space of the PinchukArtCentre?
My connection to Kyiv dates back to 2019, when I attended the Future Generation Art Prize exhibition in Kyiv. That’s where I first showed This song is for… and the response to that work was deeply informing, as at the opening and afterwards, so many femme-identifying and queer individuals spoke to me of the deep resonance they felt, as those dedication songs sounded in relation to local conditions of patriarchy and rape culture. These interactions laid a certain ground, and played a significant part in how (and why), following the full-scale invasion, PinchukArtCentre Director Björn Geldhof invited me back to produce a cycle of Personal Accounts in Kyiv. Approaching and realising this work has been a deeply relational journey, extending those first encounters into longer conversations with survivors and activists living within and despite conditions of war, whilst (as I have mentioned already) simultaneously working to dismantle socially ingrained gender norms and their violent outworkings. So, while this is my first solo show in Kyiv, I do feel it is grounded in a longer set of encounters and conversations, in a kind of reciprocal gifting, and this has profoundly shaped how this tender, beautiful, yet also searing cycle of Personal Accounts has come about.
Much of your practice involves creating immersive environments that engage both body and memory. How does this new iteration of Personal Accounts speak to the urgent realities of Ukraine today?
Well, yes, the work is very somatic and involving, as it draws one into a kind of close, sonic entanglement. In withholding the spoken words of the shared accounts, it is the residual ‘in-between’ moments that offer a space for encounter – for a different, and I would like to think more survivor-centric way of coming to know, hear and recognise each other. In contexts of ‘meta crisis’ such as the highly mediated, geopolitically-loaded spectacle of the war in Ukraine, I think this kind of attention to proximity and entanglement is crucial. I’m not saying we should do away with the documentary form as such, but rather that this kind of alternative aesthetic encounter animates a different kind of urgency – an urgency of the quotidian, the lived crisis-norm. For me, it’s about collapsing the political conditions of ‘witness’ – lodged as they are in the ‘rational’ remove of white hetero-patriarchal subjectivity – and asserting instead these terms of imbrication, which is to say a situation of sticky, ethical, political, relational entanglement. This is not about the policed conditions of testimony and ‘truth-telling’ (which is to say, believability), but the social implication we find in proximity and difference – in these ‘in-between’ spaces of relation.
Gabrielle Goliath, Personal Accounts, 2024-. ‘Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere’, La Biennale di Venezia (2024). Photo: Luc Meneghel
Testimony in your work is not just narrative—it’s presence, resistance, and sometimes mourning. How do you balance the profoundly personal with the broader political in this new piece?
Indeed, invoked presence is truly fundamental to my practice, whether in the ritual of mourning that is Elegy or in the close relational entanglement I have been speaking of regarding Personal Accounts. And yes, it is very much about asserting particularity and presence within and despite situations of systemic disregard. I consider the ‘in-general’ to be itself a form of violence, of patriarchy. So this commitment I have to the work of convening relational encounters is a distinctly political one. How we come to each other, on terms of difference and bearing, is for me the contingent, challenging, transforming grounds of a decolonial, black feminist praxis, and it’s how I navigate and hope to puncture these structural norms of ‘violence-in-general’.
What has it meant for you, as a South African artist, to work in Ukraine at this moment in time? Did you find resonances or dissonances between the cultural landscapes of resistance in both contexts?
Difference is at the heart of this work. How do we or can we relate in and across difference? How do we come to know with, as Judith Butler suggests, a certain ‘unknowing’? Or, as Sara Ahmed insists, how do we reckon with the “impossibility of fellow feeling”? Personal Accounts is not a work oriented towards social cohesion or easy narratives of healing and reconciliation. Rather, it asks that we open ourselves to the difficulty of difference – to the incommensurability of suffering and a racial-sexual economy of differentially valued life. It’s an invitation to find, in this difficulty of difference, the tentative grounds of solidarity, care and practices of repair. So, for me, approaching this cycle and this particular context cannot be an exercise in over-identification – nor can I afford to exceptionalise the Ukrainian experience (just as I am wary of exceptionalising narratives of suffering and struggle in South Africa). Rather, the opportunity is to step into this space of difficulty and difference and embrace that ‘unknowing’. This is also why it is important to me always to show different cycles of Personal Accounts in relation to one another. In Kyiv, for example, this new video cycle —a quiet rush —will sound in a (difficult) relation to other cycles produced in Como, Edinburgh, and Johannesburg, filling the space with the resonant, dissonant, wayward sonics of Black, Brown, Indigenous, femme, queer, and trans survival. And so, in addition to debuting the cycle produced in Kyiv, I am equally excited to share The Giving Tree, another new cycle, this time featuring accounts from three extraordinary South African women: Prof. Pumla Dineo Gqola, Advocate Adila Hassim, and filmmaker Arya Lalloo.
Gabrielle Goliath, Personal Accounts, 2024-. ‘Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere’, La Biennale di Venezia (2024). Photo: Luc Meneghel
The PinchukArtCentre positions itself as a space of open dialogue and global connection. What role do you believe art institutions should play in times of conflict—and how do you see this project contributing to that responsibility?
“Art is a Guaranty of Sanity”, [sic] said Louise Bourgeois. I would swap sanity with hope. It means a great deal to me that, in the midst of a full-scale war with regular attacks on the city, the Pinchuk Art Centre continues to sustain a dynamic, contemporary, and critical programme. And I have seen how the community there engages with the space, with people queuing for blocks in mid-winter for exhibition openings. It’s incredibly special, and it is a privilege for me to be presenting an exhibition there, on such a grand scale, with nineteen screens playing six cycles of Personal Accounts. I don’t believe that art plays a singular role, as such – as soon as we consign it to one, it ducks and dives and surfaces elsewhere – but it does offer a particular possibility. Suppose art can at least guarantee some measure of hope in times such as these. In that case, that is my work and will continue to be, for as the magisterial light that is Angela Davis insists (channelling Miriam Makeba): “hope is a discipline”.
The exhibition will open on August 28, 2025. For more information, please visit the PinchuckArtCentre.
