At Ibraaz in London, Gabrielle Goliath’s Elegy asks what a monument can be when stone is inadequate. The South African artist’s long-running performance project is built from voices, breath, repetition and the unstable presence of people gathered in a room.
Presented at Ibraaz through January 2027, the work brings together three suites developed across Venice, London, Milan and Sharjah. Its current London iteration gives audiences a concentrated view of a practice Goliath has been developing for more than a decade in response to gendered, racialized and queer violence.
A memorial that must be remade
In each performance, seven women sustain a collective vocal gesture that moves between lament, endurance and care. The sound is not a conventional song with a neat narrative. It is physical, difficult and shared. What appears minimal becomes emotionally demanding because the performers continually hold and renew it.
That structure changes the role of the audience. Viewers are not handed a complete story to consume. They enter a charged space where mourning remains unfinished, and where the ethics of attention matter. The work resists turning individual lives and violent deaths into spectacle.
Goliath describes the project as a lament for people whose lives have been subjected to forms of erasure. The three-suite presentation also carries the history of interrupted exhibition plans: one Venice presentation proceeded independently after a planned national pavilion was cancelled. The work’s movement across cities has therefore become part of its meaning—an archive shaped not only by performance, but by the institutional conditions that permit or obstruct it.
Why the medium matters
Elegy belongs to a broader field of contemporary practice in which the artwork is not a durable object but a set of relationships. Voice, choreography, duration and consent become material. Documentation can extend the work, yet it cannot fully replace the encounter between performers and witnesses.
For artists working with trauma, this distinction is crucial. A powerful subject does not automatically produce an ethical artwork. Goliath’s method suggests several practical questions: Who is asked to perform? What care surrounds that labour? How are names and stories disclosed or withheld? What can photography and video communicate without converting grief into content?
Institutions face corresponding responsibilities. Performance-based memorial work needs rehearsal time, fair compensation, quiet space, trained staff and clear audience guidance. Its conservation also requires more than storing a file. Scores, permissions, oral histories and the conditions of re-performance become part of the archive.
A living form of remembrance
The power of Elegy lies in its refusal to offer closure. Each iteration is temporary, but the act of gathering can be repeated. The memorial survives through disciplined care rather than physical permanence.
At Ibraaz, that makes Goliath’s work especially timely. As museums and public institutions reconsider how histories of violence are represented, Elegy proposes that remembrance can remain embodied, collective and open-ended. It is not a monument that stands apart from people. It exists because people agree to carry it together.
