This exhibit allows you to take a walk in the shoes of rape survivors

Multimedia artist, gender advocate and now 2019 Standard Bank Young Artist award-winner for visual art, Gabrielle Goliath, brings her new work, This song is for …, to Johannesburg this month.

Following its successful run at the National Arts Festival in Makhanda, the work moves to the Standard Bank Art Gallery in Johannesburg, where it will be presented as an immersive audio and visual installation.

On entering the exhibition space, audiences are confronted by a unique collection of dedication songs playing sequentially, each one chosen by a survivor of rape.

The songs are of personal significance to the survivors, taking them back to a particular time and place, evoking a sensory world of memory and emotion.

‘This song is for…’ installation view. Picture: Maksim Belousov

As collaborators in the project, the survivors also shared a colour of their choosing and a written reflection. The artist then worked closely with a group of women and genderqueer-led musical ensembles to reinterpret and re-perform the songs.

Leading local musicians such as Nonku Phiri, Desire Marea, Msaki, Gabi Motuba, Dope Saint Jude, B?JIN and Jacobi de Villiers are featured.

New renditions of well-known songs like Bohemian Rhapsody, Ave Maria and Save the Hero are among the reinterpretations.

In the course of each song, a sonic disruption is introduced; a recurring musical rupture recalling the “broken record” effect of a scratched vinyl LP.

In this performed disruption is an opportunity for listeners to imagine a space of traumatic recall – one in which the subject of rape and its psychic afterlives become painfully entangled with personal and political claims to life, dignity, hope, faith and joy.

‘This song is for…’ installation view. Picture: Maksim Belousov

Speaking of the work, Goliath says: “In a work like This song is for … I am seeking to resist the violence through which black, brown, feminine, queer and vulnerable bodies are routinely objectified, in the ways they are imaged, written about, spoken about. What I have in mind is a more empathic interaction.”

The artist situates her practice within contexts marked by the traces, disparities and as-of-yet unreconciled traumas of colonialism and apartheid, as well as the socially entrenched structures of patriarchal power and the rape culture.

This song is for … is at the Standard Bank Gallery until September 24, and includes a programme of live performances.

“When language fails us, when conventional therapy fails us, art allows for a different kind of encounter, a more human encounter perhaps. One in which the differences that mark our experiences of the world become the grounds for our mutual acknowledgement and care,” explains Goliath.

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