Gabrielle Goliath's 'Bearing' at Raffaella Cortese, Milan

South African artist Gabrielle Goliath (b. 1983, Kimberley) presents her solo exhibition 'Bearing' at Galleria Raffaella Cortese in Milan, ahead of her concurrent show 'Elegy' at Chiesa di Sant'Antonin in Venice's Castello district. The exhibition focuses on drawing and the beauty of free communication, using expressive mark-making to challenge contemporary politics that erect barriers against non-conforming bodies. Goliath questions what it means to carry a racial-sexual code of lack and vulnerability to violence in one's body. She employs multiple media to address the limitations and restrictions imposed on so-called 'non-conforming presences.' The exhibition references an interview Goliath gave to Laura Cocciolillo for Art Frame in June 2024, where she stated that not all bodies are equal or equally credible in political representation, and that a differential valuation of lives (anti-Black/brown/poor/female) sustains an inequitable regime where white heteronormativity reads while 'affectable others' do not. The show also evokes the story of Claudette Colvin, a pregnant teenager arrested weeks before Rosa Parks for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus, as recounted by professor Jonathan Scott Holloway. Goliath's work gives space to refusal and veiled indifference, coloring non-acceptance and fragility with powerful choruses and voices that can no longer be silenced.