Dominique White, Deadweight @ Whitechapel

Dominique White, The Swelling Enemy, 2024

Dominique White's small exhibition of four sculptures, Deadweight, at the Whitechapel Gallery has received great reviews. It's an innovative series of works that raises provocative questions about the ocean and all that flows with it in this age of awareness around environmental destruction, the legacies of colonialism, industrialization, and forced migration. However, the exhibition is perhaps more conceptually provocative than the works themselves. White spent time in Italy working with craftspeople and historians, effectively researching the history and materials of shipwrecks, flotsam, piracy, and the movement along trade routes over centuries. The historical details are not as apparent as the integration and exploration of specific materials.

Dominique White, Dead Reckoning, 2024

The works engage questions of the detritus of industry and colonialism secreted by the ocean over centuries. Iron rods, chalk, rafia, driftwood are sculpted into emblems of all that has been discarded from the travels of merchant ships, slave ships, and the adventures of industrial modernity. In Dead Reckoning, for example, iron rods tangled together, rusted by time immersed in the Mediterranean, reach into the air like tentacles, as though transformed into a threatening monster-like animal. In another work, rafia and string holding chalky bundles drip from rusted rods. The organic materials look to have been eroding in water over centuries. These works give the impression that everything discarded by human pursuits will grow uncontrollably at the bottom of the ocean. While they may be invisible, apparently wasting away, another eco-system is busy at work. Certainly, decay and simultaneous constant movement and transformation are characteristics of the underground world shown in White's sculptures. 

Dominique White, Ineligible for Death, 2024

In a video accompanying the exhibition, White talks about her time in Italy on a fellowship, visiting various Italian port and inland cities. She talks of the ephemerality of sea journeys, the history of slavery as it is written on the walls of store facilities in Palermo, of the industrial energy of Genoa, the ironworks in Todi, making of bells in Agnone. White's reach for these ancient traditions and activities is fascinating. Certainly, the sculptures show the care and craftsmanship that have fashioned their strange objectness. 

Dominique White, Split Obliteration, 2024

What is less convincing is the connection being made between questions of racial oppression and White's sculptures. Of course, slavery and trafficking, migration and colonization are inextricable from the stories of the ocean. However, it's difficult to see these histories in the sculptures themselves. Otherwise, this small exhibition of four creepy sculptures is well worth a visit. Don't miss out on the video.