Faces of domestic violence?

But something is not quite right about the portraits, collectively titled Faces Of People Who May Or May Not Be Victims Or Perpetrators Of Domestic Violence. Look at them for long enough and you’ll discover that it’s their symmetry that is disquieting.

The perfect matching of each feature on the opposite side of each subject’s head gives them a vaguely sinister air, simply because it’s unnatural.

Artist Gabrielle Goliath continues to manipulate the way her subjects are presented in Personal Accounts, a series of five video portraits. Women with expressive faces look – and sound – as they are about to say something, but they are not given the chance, as any utterance is carefully edited out.

Still, with these faces exhibiting slight changes in expression and being conventionally asymmetrical, they offer a different sort of character to the static options around the corner.

Goliath is soft-spoken, with a shy, reserved demeanour. She says she had no prior knowledge of most of her subjects, grinning as she admits, “Some of them are people I just accosted in the shops.”

She credits Cape Town photographer Tony Meintjes with the technical excellence behind the photographs.

“I was fascinated by the results we achieved when I mirrored the side of the face that was in shadow in the original photographs,” she says.

Another part of the exhibition is called Krieg Dem Krige/Five Studies, after German pacifist Ernst Friedrich’s anti-war presentation (krieg dem krige means “war against war”), which included photographs of soldiers whose faces have been ruined by horrendous injuries.

Goliath’s etchings of some of those pieces give the images differing effects: one looks like Second World War Soviet propaganda while another is warmer than expected; merely tired rather than damaged beyond repair.

This exhibition will be on at the Goodman Gallery, until February 15