Gabrielle Goliath

Faces of people who may or may not be victims or perpetrators of domestic violence

Series of 12 photographic diptychs
2014

In contrast to the public spectacle of state violence and war, domestic violence is confined by definition (or at least association) to the environment of the home, is deemed a ‘private affair’. Consigned to this domicile sanctum, and subject to the stigma and fear of reprisal (or dismissal) associated with any sort of disclosure, the victims as well as perpetrators of this conflict remain to a large degree ‘faceless’.

In this troubling of the photographic portrait, twelve collaborating subjects are presented as people who may or may not be victims or perpetrators of domestic violence. Large, dramatically lit, and mirroring just a single side of each face, the portraits have an unsettling quality – of showing and not showing – implicating each of these ‘everyday South Africans’ within a crisis-norm of intimate partner violence - as victim, perpetrator or both. Refusing the behind-closed-doors paradigm of domestic violence, the series draws viewers into a less fixed, more entangled mode of witness, as in questioning these hyper-visualised individuals they perform their own questionability – which is to say, their own complex entanglement within an everyday, everywhere social reality of misogyny, rape culture and patriarchal disavowal.