South African artist Gabrielle Goliath fills a London basement with a single sustained note of grief, and it refuses to let the world look away.
South African artist Gabrielle Goliath has brought one of the most gut-punching works of the year to London, and it is not built on spectacle. It is built on a single note. Elegy, now showing at Ibraaz in Fitzrovia, is a video and audio installation that turns mourning into something loud, collective and impossible to ignore.
The set-up is brutally simple. Three films each feature a woman singing one sustained note. When her lungs begin to give out, another woman steps in and carries the note on, so it never dies. The sound pours out of the basement and into the street, a wail that follows you before you even reach the stairs.
The work commemorates murder, injustice and genocide, and it makes no attempt to soften any of it. This is grief with its fists clenched. There is no melody to hide in and no resolution to settle for, only the relay of voices and the refusal to let the sound fall silent.
The piece was reportedly judged too controversial for the Venice Biennale, and it nearly never reached an audience at all. That makes its arrival at Ibraaz, a relatively new cultural space, feel like a statement in itself. Goliath has made a lament that works as a call to action: when one voice tires, the next must rise.
