In Conversation: Gabrielle Goliath and Tina Campt

Please join us on Thursday, March 7 from 5-7pm for a conversation with Gabrielle Goliath and Tina Campt. The speakers will discuss Goliath’s powerful and celebrated sound installation This song is for… (2019-) which is making its U.S. premiere in Cantando Bajito: Testimonies. The conversation will explore frequencies of Black life, thinkings around refusal and hapticity, and collaborative testimonial encounters.

This event is presented as part of the gallery exhibition Cantando Bajito: Testimonies on view March 5 through May 4.

About the speakers

Gabrielle Goliath

Through the ritual, sonic and social encounters of her art practice, Gabrielle Goliath (b.1983, South Africa) attends (and tends) to histories and present-day conditions of differentially valued life, reaffirming ways in which black, brown, femme and queer practices of possibility perform the world differently. Each of her works convenes a coming-to – a tenuous community – collapsing the presumed remove and privileged subject position of representation (as white, male, heteronormative) and calling for meetings in and across difference, in terms of complicity, relation and love.

Goliath’s immersive, often durational installations have shown across South Africa and internationally. She has won several awards including a Future Generation Art Prize – Special Prize (2019), the Standard Bank Young Artist Award (2019), and the Institut Français, Afrique en Créations Prize at the Bamako Biennale (2017). Her work features in numerous public and private collections, including TATE Modern, Frac Bretagne, Iziko South African National Gallery, Johannesburg Art Gallery, and Wits Art Museum. She lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Tina Campt

Tina Campt is a black feminist theorist of visual culture and contemporary art and lead convener of the Practicing Refusal Collective and the Sojourner Project. She began her career as a historian of modern Germany, earning a Ph.D. in history from Cornell University. She is one of the founding scholars of Black European Studies, and her early work theorized gender, racial, and diasporic formation in black communities in Europe and southern Africa, with an emphasis on the role of vernacular photography in historical interpretation. Campt’s more recent scholarship bridges the divide between vernacular image-making in black diasporic communities and the interventions of black contemporary artists in reshaping how we see ourselves and our societies. Her teaching reflects her ongoing interest in exploring the multiple sensory registers of images and the importance of attending to their sonic and haptic registers.

Campt has published five books and received the 2020 Photography Catalogue of the Year Award from Paris Photo and Aperture Foundation for her co-edited collection, Imagining Everyday Life: Engagements with Vernacular Photography (with Marianne Hirsch, Gil Hochberg and Brian Wallis, Steidl, 2020). Campt has held faculty positions at Brown University, Barnard College-Columbia University, Duke University, University of California-Santa Cruz, and the Technical University of Berlin.