As you enter Dallas Contemporary’s cavernous exhibition spaces, you hear a hum. It sounds like a swarm of bees or the whir of an enormous machine. It’s a dark, ominous sound — an unnatural one for a museum — and it seems endless.
That sound comes from the University of Cape Town choir humming in unison in Gabrielle Goliath’s installation, Chorus. The piece, which consists of video, sound and text, is tucked behind a dark curtain, in a small room near the front of the museum. “The exhibit contains really heavy subject matter. It can get to be too much,” the front desk attendant tells a group of people on my second visit. “In that case, don’t be afraid to step out.”
Chorus, like other pieces by Goliath, addresses violence against women. After losing a childhood friend to domestic violence, the South African artist has dedicated much of her career to what she describes as the “life work of mourning.”
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Her works tend to be elegiac — one series is titled “Elegy.” And many of her works center on the tragic deaths of loved ones, community members and friends. In all of her art, she names the person who died.
This particular piece, which was created in 2020, is dedicated to Uyinene Mrwetyana, a student at the University of Cape Town who was raped and murdered in 2019, at the age of 19. One long wall of text lists the names of South Africans who have died at the hands of violence against women and nonbinary people since Mrwetyana’s death.
Chorus is in some ways linear: The viewer’s experience has a beginning, middle and end. And yet, the room seems lost to any typical markers of time.
Visitors enter the space, which is so dark that it takes a minute or two for your eyes to adjust. There are two video screens. On one, a choir enters and fills the risers; on the other, the choir never enters and the risers stay empty. The video is nothing more than the choir staring into the camera, humming several octaves of a single note, which my companion — a professional opera singer — identified as G-sharp. Members of the choir drop off to take a breath, or wipe away their tears, but the collective sound continues.
When the performance is over, the choir leaves, and the risers are empty once more, before the video plays again. The space has cushions for visitors to sit and watch as much of the 23-minute video as they can bear.
If this sonic exercise stands for the moments when language fails us, the long wall of text serves as a literal commemoration of tragedy. When the piece was originally set to premiere in 2020, 473 names were on the list; when the Dallas Contemporary exhibit opened in September, the number had grown to 680. Goliath’s updates to the piece have made it a kind of living artifact.
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If this sounds heavy, it is. Both times, I walked out of the space wiping tears from my face. It was jarring to emerge into the bright lights and saturated colors of Dallas Contemporary’s enormous exhibition by Shepard Fairey, a graphic artist known for his riffs on the image of Andre the Giant. And even when I left the building, it took a minute for that humming — that unceasing drone — to grow a little quieter in my head, until eventually, it was gone.
Details
Chorus runs through March 19 at Dallas Contemporary, 161 Glass St. Tuesday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. Admission is free. dallascontemporary.org.
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At Dallas Contemporary, South African artist honors victims of violence - The Dallas Morning News
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