Dominique White in her studio in Todi, 2024, Photo: Zouhair Bellahmar
Dominique White during her Italian residency at Campane Marinelli, 2023, Photo: Le Iridi Digitali
Dominique White at Fonderia Artistica Battaglia during her Italian residency, 2023. Photo: Andrea Rossetti / Héctor Chico
Dominique White, Deadweight (detail) in her studio in Todi during her Italian residency, 2024. Photo: Zouhair Bellahmar
Past Exhibition
★★★★ ‘Enter Dominique White’s tolling sea-bell of an exhibition and you will be hooked, then dragged down deep.’ – The Guardian
Dominique White (b.1993, UK), winner of the ninth edition of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women, presents a new body of work, Deadweight.
A thought-provoking exploration of rebellion and transformation, Deadweight comprises four large-scale sculptural works which continue the artist’s interest in creating new worlds for ‘Blackness’ and fascination with the metaphoric potency and regenerative power of the sea.
The title Deadweight derives from a nautical term which collapses everything on a ship into a single unit which determines the ship’s ability to float and function as intended. White deliberately inverts this, offering disruption as opposed to stability – a reckoning with the tipping point of the ship to offer the possibility of emancipation through abolition.
The works combine force and fragility: undulating angular structures formed from metals manipulated into forms evocative of anchors, a ship’s hull, mammal carcasses or skeletons – lost or abandoned material forms that, through White’s treatment, become symbols of defiance.
As part of the process, the sculptures were immersed in the Mediterranean Sea: both a physical and poetic gesture to explore the transformative effect of water on material objects. The resulting forms display the rust and oxidation of the metals, the fragmentation of organic elements, such as sisal, raffia and driftwood, as well as carrying the lingering scent of seawater.
The new commission weaves together concepts of Afrofuturism, Afro-pessimism and Hydrarchy – philosophies central to White’s research and artistic practice. Her work envisions an Afro future, located outside of traditional utopian science fiction, in an oceanic realm with the potential to offer fluid, rebellious realities, liberated from capitalist and colonial influence. White’s sculptures, or ‘beacons’, recall sea-bound, imagined worlds which prophesise the emergence of the Stateless: “a [Black] future that hasn’t yet happened, but must.”
Deadweight was developed from White’s winning proposal for the ninth edition of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women and realised during a six-month residency organised by Collezione Maramotti.
Read the full exhibition press release.
Deadweight is travelling to Collezione Maramotti and will be on display 27 Oct 2024 – 16 Feb 2025.
Dominique White has a BA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths and a Foundation in Art and Design from Central Saint Martins. Recent solo exhibitions and presentations include: Destruction of Order, VEDA (Florence, Italy, 2024); Dominique White and Alberta Whittle: Sargasso Sea, ICA Philadelphia (Philadelphia, USA 2024); When Disaster Strikes…, Kunsthalle Münster (Münster, Germany 2023-4), May You Break Free and Outlive Your Enemy, La Casa Encendida (Madrid, Spain, 2023) and Statements, Art Basel (Basel, Switzerland, 2022). Recent group exhibitions include Afterimage at MAXXI; Aquila (Italy, L’Aquila, 2022-2023); Love at Bold Tendencies (London, UK, 2022); Techno Worlds at Art Quarter Budapest, commissioned by Goethe-Institut (Travelling) (2021-2025).
White was awarded the Foundwork Artist Prize of 2022 (US), has received awards from Artangel (UK), the Henry Moore Foundation (UK) in 2020 and the Roger Pailhas Prize (Art-O-Rama, FR) in conjunction with her solo presentation with VEDA in 2019. White was in residency at Sagrada Mercancía (Chile), Triangle France – Astéride (France) and La Becque (Switzerland) in 2020 and 2021.
