Gabriel Jalut: Review of 'Elegy-Dirge': A Devastating Lament, an Enraged Single-Note Call

Ibraaz, London, which has stirred much debate at the Venice Biennale, recalls the chilling murders and genocides in this video and sound work through furious mourning. The sound of lamentation spills into the streets. An endless moan echoes from the basement of Ibraaz, a relatively new cultural center in London's Fitzrovia. This heartrending elegy by Gabriel Goliat, in which each of three films shows a woman singing only one note until her lungs...

The sound of mourning pours into the streets. An endless wailing note echoes from the basement of Ibraaz, a relatively new cultural center in London's Fitzrovia. It's Gabriel Goliath's haunting dirge, each of its three films featuring a woman singing just one note until her lungs fail and another woman steps in to fill her place. As a note is about to die, it is sustained. It is a sad and moving act of mourning for murder, injustice and genocide.

A group of five of South Africa's leading cultural voices have chosen Goliath's work to represent their country at the Venice Summer Biennale. Goliath has been working on this project for a decade, collecting voices, collecting stories. It was a work about LGBTQ+ femicide and murder in South Africa, but expanded. The latest iteration deals with the Ovaherero and Nama genocide in Namibia and the death of a Palestinian poet in 2023. It was a step too far for Gayton McKenzie, South Africa's Minister of Sports, Arts and Culture.

McKenzie is the head of the far-right Patriotic Union Party and has strongly supported Israel in recent years. He wrote a letter describing it as "deeply divisive". He demanded to edit the work and remove the offensive part about the Palestinian poet. Goliath refused, so McKenzie called it quits and canceled his Venice stand. He fought tooth and nail and took his case to the top of the South African court, but the case was dismissed. The South African pavilion at the Biennale was shamefully empty, a grand and stunning visual metaphor for the global scope of the culture wars and a symbol of censorship against violence.

Goliath instead found a home for it in a nearby church, where I first saw it. It was devastating then, an almost too emotional work of art in a beautiful setting. Ibraz lacks the ornate and serene atmosphere of a Venetian cathedral, but makes up for it in total darkness. Space is black except for the screen. A film in tribute to Epling Christine Moholan, a woman who was strangled and abandoned on a farm near Johannesburg in 2015. The other film is in honor of two women who died at the hands of German colonial oppressors during the Namibian genocide between 1904 and 1908. Gaza from 2023.

This isn't a soft, plaintive wail—the room is a discordant, unsettling place, filled with a wail of contrasting vibrato and offbeat notes. It sounds angry, vicious, angry, because it is. It is not just an act of commemoration, but a call to action, a demand for change and justice.

While incredibly emotional and deeply moving, the main feeling you get is one of hopelessness and despair, not sadness. What makes the lament so powerful is the endless proliferation of horrific images we are bombarded with on a daily basis, and if you want to see images of death and genocide, you only have to look at social media or the news. More than ever before, we have access to shocking and real images of horrific current events. But Goliath has destroyed the image and left you with only the feeling, so all that remains is anger and heartache.

This is an act of resistance against the image economy, against murder and femicide, against violence and genocide. It's a feminist rant, a cry against it all.

But it's also an important piece of modern art, a symbol of our times, our wars and cultural frictions, and its voice lingers in your ears long after you're gone.