Gabrielle Goliath

“I appreciate your note on the centrality of bodily presence and situated knowledge, which is key to the political, poetic, affective and conceptual impetus of the work, as it calls us into a different, more relational aesthetic encounter. It is, however, important to recall that not all “bodies” are equal, or equally “believable”, and do not enter into political representation on commensurate terms. An (anti-black/brown/poor/femme) index of differentially valued life continues to sustain an inequitable regime of representation, one in which white heteronormativity reads (and reads well) whilst the “affectable others” (to cite Denise Ferreira da Silva) do not.”

Art Frame Interview read

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Personal Accounts - Deinde Falase

3-channel video & sound installation
2024

As a well-known news anchor at the Nigerian Television Authority in Abuja, it fell to Deinde Falase to publicly announce the Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Bill, signed into law by President Goodluck Jonathan on January 7, 2014. In addition to criminalising same-sex marriage, the bill further imposed a 10-year prison sentence on individuals engaging in or ‘making a show’ of same-sex amorous relationships, as well as those frequenting gay clubs or associating with organisations or societies supportive of gay rights.

Shortly after the announcement, Deinde left Nigeria for South Africa, where the rights of LGBTIQ+ people are constitutionally enshrined. Ten years later, however, he is still an asylum seeker without a work permit, unable to find employment despite his credentials, which include a Masters Degree from the University of Leeds. Failed by yet another state, the precarity of his experience is heightened by the everyday threat of Afrophobic and homophobic violence in South Africa.

Deinde’s account is shared in three parts. In the centre panel he addresses his beloved mother, who died before he felt able to fully disclose his sexual identity, and whose funeral in Nigeria he was unable to attend. The account to the right is directed towards his supportive elder brother who lives in the USA, and to the left, his younger brother in Nigeria who has all but disowned him.

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