PRESENTATION: Dominique White-Deadweight
Dominique White works function as abstract commemorative sculptures that appear as if they have been literally dredged from the sea, monuments to an underwater nation made up of a submerged, aquatically immured non-human entities. In her work, she has recourse to different legends that take place in the water and that have their foundations there.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Collezione Maramotti Archive
Dominique White presents “Deadweight”, a body of works made in 2024. After a premiere at Whitechapel Gallery in London (2/7-15/9/2024), White has conceived a new exhibition design adapted to the spaces of Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia. A thought-provoking exploration of rebellion and transformation, “Deadweight” comprises four large-scale sculptural works which pursue the artist’s interest in creating new worlds for Blackness, as well as her fascination with the metaphoric potency and regenerative power of the sea. The title “Deadweight” derives from a nautical term that compresses everything on a ship into a single unit, one which determines the ship’s ability to float and function as intended. White deliberately inverts this concept, 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 in which metals have been manipulated into shapes evocative of anchors, a ship’s hull, mammal carcasses or skeletons. They are 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: an act that was both physical and poetic, to explore the transformative effect of water on material objects. The resulting forms display the rust and oxidation of the metal and the fragmentation of organic elements such as sisal, raffia and driftwood, while carrying the lingering scent of seawater. The new commission weaves together concepts of Afrofuturism, Afro-pessimism and Hydrarchy – philosophies central to White’s artistic investigation and 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 prophesize the emergence of the Stateless: “a [Black] future that hasn’t yet happened, but must.”
Photo: Dominique White in her studio in Todi , 2024, Ph. Zouhair Bellahmar
Info: Collezione Maramotti , Via Fratelli Cervi 66, Reggio Emilia, Italy, Duration: 27/10/2024-16/2/2025, Days & Hours: Thu-Fri 14:30-18:30, Sat-Sun 10:30-18:30, www.collezionemaramotti.org/
