Gabrielle Goliath: Personal Accounts / Guadalupe Maravilla: Piedras de Fuego (Fire Stones)

Talbot Rice Gallery announces the first solo exhibitions in the UK to open October 26, 2024 by Gabrielle Goliath and Guadalupe Maravilla.

Gabrielle Goliath’s Personal Accounts is a transnational, decolonial, black feminist project of repair. In an immersive and deeply affecting series of video and sound cycles, Goliath addresses the global normativity of patriarchal violence, working in close collaboration with survivors and allies in Johannesburg, Tunis, Oslo, Milan, Stellenbosch and now Edinburgh. 

To experience an artwork by Gabrielle Goliath is to step into an emotional, ethical and relational encounter. In works such as Personal Accounts, she asks for something more than the passive remove of witness, as participants reckon with the everyday conditions of racial, gendered and sexual violence. However, as she makes clear, her work is not about violence. Rather, it traces and celebrates the multiplicity of ways in which black, brown, indigenous, femme, queer, non-binary and trans individuals survive and cultivate conditions in which to thrive.

For the Edinburgh cycle of Personal Accounts, Goliath has worked closely with the team at Talbot Rice Gallery, as well as collaborators from Edinburgh and its surrounds—a community of women and gender-diverse individuals who bravely share their personal accounts of survival and repair. At times the filmed accounts revisit traumatic experiences of physical, sexual, emotional and/or material harm. In other instances, they unpack the more incremental, everyday structures, norms, expectations and encounters that uphold patriarchy and recycle the precarity of femme and non-gender-normative lives. Withholding the spoken words of the shared accounts, Goliath unlocks alternative sonic grammars to reflect the fugitive ways in which survivors assert life and possibility within and despite conditions of negation.

In this tender address of breaths, sighs, cries and even laughter, she calls for a politics of love and avowal that does not disregard intersectional difference, contextual specificities, or the incommensurability of suffering, but asks for more collective, embodied, survivor-centric ways of coming to know, hear and recognise each other.

Curated by Tessa Giblin.

Piedras de Fuego (Fire Stones) is the first solo exhibition in the UK of Guadalupe Maravilla, transforming Talbot Rice Gallery’s Georgian Gallery into a place for recovery and regeneration. Gathering his remarkable personal journey and teachings from healers and shamans from around the world, Maravilla’s sculptures, paintings and murals are made to be powerful healing instruments.

They retrace the route he made as an eight-year-old undocumented and unaccompanied migrant, fleeing the civil war in El Salvador to journey to the United States. This decision, to face places of trauma, was informed by his diagnosis with stage three colon cancer and having to find a way to heal more profoundly. Objects collected on this journey become part of artworks, including the towering shrine-like sculptures called Disease Throwers and the Retablo devotional paintings, which give thanks to the miracles and experiences that have happened in his life. Sound is central to Maravilla’s approach to healing and Sound as Medicine, Maravilla’s new album of sound performances, will play throughout.

Volcanic sculptures give the exhibition its title. Made by artisan Miguel Ángel Peña Cervantes in Mexico, Dream Backpacks refer to people immigrating to the US by land in search of the “American Dream”. The rock references a long history of displaced people from Central America—where the migratory routes to the US follow a tectonic line marked by volcanoes—whilst echoing the emotional and psychological weight of this journey. Related embroidered works symbolize manos ancestrales (“ancestor’s hands”), influenced by the artist’s Maya/Mestizo ancestry, whilst sculptural hammocks offer a place of rest for ancestors. 

Linking everything together across the walls of Talbot Rice’s neoclassical gallery are murals made by playing a game from Maravilla’s childhood, the Tripa Chuca. As an eight-year-old, Maravilla used this game to form relationships with the coyotes and grandmothers and other generous people that helped him through his journey.

Curated by James Clegg.

Gabrielle Goliath’s and Guadalupe Maravilla’s exhibitions are supported by Creative Scotland and Edinburgh College of Art at the University of Edinburgh. Guadalupe Maravilla’s exhibition is also supported by the Henry Moore Foundation.

Forthcoming at Talbot Rice Gallery
Walker & Bromwich: Searching for a Change of Consciousness
March 15–May 31, 2025

Zoe Walker and Neil Bromwich’s practice combines utopian, socialist and animist ideals to create festival-like spaces for communities to come together around issues related to climate change and social justice. Searching for A Change of Consciousness will reflect on a number of socially-engaged projects that includes working-class communities in Wales, anarchists in Denmark, environmental scholars and Indigenous representatives from the Columbian Amazon.

Stay in touch with us as we explore what the 16th-century University of Edinburgh, together with Edinburgh College of Art, can contribute to contemporary art research and production today and in the future.

Press contact: Josh Young  josh.young@ed.ac.uk