March 29, 2023 |
For 18 years, the biennial Max Mara Art Prize for Women has uplifted UK-based female-identifying artists, championing artists, of any age, at a crucial stage in their career and supporting talent that is often all too stifled in favour of male counterparts. The only visual arts laureate of its kind in the UK, since it was established in partnership with the Whitechapel Gallery in 2005, it grants its winners a bespoke six-month residency at locations around Italy that culminates with a major solo exhibition at the London showspace in 2024 and at Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia, Italy. The residency, tailored to fit, inform and develop the winning proposal through increased visibility and the provision of resources (essential time, space and professional support), as well as dedicated mentoring, research, study, field trips and studio work, offers long-term reinforcement to recipients.
Last night, during a special ceremony at the Whitechapel Gallery in East London, Max Mara announced its ninth meriting recipient: Dominique White, the Black woman artist weaving together theories of Black Subjectivity, Afro-pessimism and Hydrarchy with nautical myths that are particularly relevant to the Black Diaspora through the use of found nautical relics such as old sails, masts, burned mahogany, chains and rope. Up against a shortlist that included Rebecca Bellantoni, Bhajan Hunjan, Onyeka Igwe, and Zinzi Minott, White was selected by a jury of art-industry experts chaired by the Prize’s guest curator, Bina von Stauffenberg alongside the Whitechapel Gallery’s director Gilane Tawadros and consisting of gallerist Rozsa Farkas, writer Derica Shields, artist Claudette Johnson and collector Maria Sukkar.
Living and working between Essex and Marseille, White creates nautically rich sculptures and ghostly installations that imagine new worlds for Blackness and harness the metaphoric potency and regenerative power of the sea. White’s winning proposal, dubbed Deadweight, takes its starting point from the maritime measure of ‘deadweight tonnage’, an official term that calculates how much weight a ship can take before it sinks.
Now Dominique is about to embark on her six-month residency across Europe, where she will explore the meaning and exploitation of ‘deadweight tonnage’, tracing its resonance back to the slave trade and its contemporary forms in the Mediterranean by working with historian, journalists and visiting key sites herself. She will also visit nautical museums, archives and collections; forage ship (grave)yards for scrap materials; and work alongside metal working tradespeople to deepen her comprehension of the production processes, and all the adept skills and techniques that are required to continue developing Deadweight. It’d be remiss not to mention as well, what might be the most innovative element of her entire project: as the residency comes to a close, White has plans to build and then submerge elements of the final work in the Tyrrhenian Sea just off the west coast of Italy. This will then form the basis of her solo exhibition in two years’ time (who ever heard of thalassophobia?) But, before she takes to the seas, we had the chance to pick her brain about the prize and its potential impact on her work, dive deep into Deadweight, and discuss her inspirations and ideas about her future.
1. What does it mean to you to be the winner of this year’s Max Mara Art Prize for Women?
“It’s such an honour to have won this award and in truth, I’m still reeling. When I got the phone call with the news that I had won, it was so unexpected that it genuinely left me speechless. I called my mum moments after receiving the news, and just burst into tears of utter disbelief. It was – and is – an overwhelming privilege.
“Just being nominated for the prize alongside such incredible artists has been such a wonderful period of validation and the mutual respect, admiration and, in many senses, the shared values between us all, has been incredibly affirming. Being given the opportunity to realise a new body of work and to be able to focus intensely on research and production is both immensely exciting, if also a little daunting. I feel like lots of luck, risky decision making and back-breaking seemingly endless production periods have led to this moment. I honestly never dreamed this would be possible – even less attainable – 10 years ago, five years ago, even a year ago. It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity and I’m incredibly proud and excited to see what this new era will bring.”
2. Can you walk us through Deadweight, your winning proposal for the 9th edition of the Prize?
“Deadweight will be the sequel to the Hydra series (2021 – present) which uses the myth of Hercules and the slaying of the many-headed beast as an allegory for Blackness’ and its position in a capitalist Nation-state. I wanted to harness the various alternative endings as a means to describe different or possible attempts of abolition against the persistent regenerative efforts of the State.
“Deadweight derives from the term “Deadweight Tonnage” – a nautical unit which collapses everything on a ship (cargo, crew, provisions, etc) into a single, containable unit that then determines the ship’s ability to float and therefore function as designed. For me, the ship as both an object and symbol has been at the core of my research for the past five or so years, and I use it as an analogy for the State or Nation-State – as arguably, without the ship (cargo, explorative, exploitative), the State or Nation-State would not exist.
“I was introduced to the term “Deadweight”, and its historical and contemporary resonance through the book Dear Science and Other Stories by Katherine McKittrick, a book in which Blackness is described as a demonic or corrupt algorithm within the system of algorithms that makes up the State. Blackness is positioned as an algorithm that is unimaginable, unquantifiable and volatile, yet forever bound to the State or, in my terms, the Ship. This proposal signifies a shift in thinking that reduces these two potentially oppositional entities (Blackness and the State) into one form, which could initially be read as defeatist or pessimistic, but draws on this idea of volatility and this refusal to be categorically defined as a means of resistance – which becomes a means of causing the ship to sink or destroy itself from within.”
3. What is your personal history with nautics and the sea?
“The sea has always been a point of fascination as I truly believe that it embodies a site of imagination and a site of resistance, and has been present throughout my practice for the past ten years. I’m captivated by the unknown or immeasurable qualities of the sea, its ability to evade capture and blur the strict border of land and therefore power. A turning point in my deep adoration for the sea arrived when I was introduced to the incredible world of Drexciya; an underwater nation interpreted by the Detroit electronic music duo, (James Stinson and Gerald Donald) working under the same name in the 90s and early 00s. For me, Drexciya (which proposed a new understanding of modern afro-futurism and positioned alternative futures/realities/dimensions here on Earth instead of outer space) and their music will always continue to be a reference throughout my practice. I even continue to cite certain tracks such as “Black Sea” as direct references for works. They reiterated this idea of the sea as an intangible realm, where all laws of nature that we understand on land are irrelevant, stretching the notion of time and death essentially into immortality.
“There’s a passage from Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake that still haunts me years after I read it for the first time. It reads: “they, like us, are alive in hydrogen, in oxygen; in carbon, in phosphorus, and iron; in sodium and chlorine. This is what we know about those Africans thrown, jumped, dumped overboard in Middle Passage; they are with us still, in the time of the wake, known as residence time.”
4. The array of mediums available to artists is essentially endless, so how did you find your knack in sculpture and installations? What was your art evolution and journey like to arrive at this point?
“Sculpture and installation feels the logical format to manifest my practice, as they are the disciplines that best reflect the way that I tactilely process the references and theory that feed my thinking. I feel that I tend to overwhelm myself with references – I have folders upon folders of snippets, scans and sketches littered throughout my studio – and producing in 3D is the only way I can seem to process everything.
“To be honest, I tend to refer to myself as a mediator within this whole process and the works as “bodies” or “entities”. Whilst there are meditative or therapeutic elements within making, notably through the methods used in net-weaving, I would also place myself in a branch of auto-destructivism. I find such joy in pushing these materials to the end of their physical limits, joy in breaking the rules of certain methods and of course, destroying the power dynamic between “object” and viewer. It allows me to wreak havoc in ways beyond a singular human form is able to; to take up more space than my physical form will ever allow. What “bodies” or “entities” emerge as a result of this auto-destructive process, are a cohesive extension of myself singing their own songs of salvation.”
Photography by Bernice Mulenga.
5. How does living and working between Marseille and Essex, a transnational lens, inform the work you do?
“I’ve been researching and producing between the UK and EU since 2018, but really felt the restrictions since Brexit came into play. Floating somewhat between the two has enabled so many new possibilities for production and collaborations across the Bloc. If I hadn’t taken this huge risk by firmly placing a foot in the EU during the onset of Brexit restrictions, I honestly feel that I wouldn’t be able to continue making art, not least due to the overwhelming costs that I was facing whilst based solely in London.
“Being split between different locations has most definitely broadened my perspective on my own practice, especially in conversations surrounding how it translates (or doesn’t) translate into different languages and/or politics. At points, it has put limits on my practice, but I think this is also related to surviving throughout the pandemic and the extreme pace that my schedule was pushed to, in order to financially survive.”
6. As an artist, you are interested in creating new worlds for Blackness and are fascinated by the metaphoric potency and regenerative power of the sea. You weave together theories of Black Subjectivity, Afro-pessimism and Hydrarchy. Why? What is the significance of these ideas to you personally?
“Music is at the core of my practice – despite there being no audible sound – as it is through jazz, hip-hop and techno that I found an accessible route to understanding Afro-futurism, Afro-Pessimism and even contemporary forms of salvation songs. It is actually quite rare to see me without headphones, especially in the studio as for me this symbiosis of music, theory and form-making is the only way that I can build these worlds for Blackness. It started with Sun Ra and his visions for a Black planet, but I quickly became disillusioned with this vision when this impending race to colonise space emerged. That’s when Drexciya and their depictions of the Drexciyan nation became embedded in my practice and in fact moulded new understandings of what a Black future could look like here on Earth. For me, this is a future that has disregarded by what we understand as the laws of Nature on land and depicts the persistence of Black life despite its non-compliance. It is perhaps why I place emphasis on being informed by aquatic Afro-futurism as opposed to general Afro-futurism as I am more interested in the intangibility of this unknown realm and how whilst the sea has been used as a tool, in combination with the ship, to exploit over land (Hydrarchy), it is also a threat to this very system.
“Aquatic afro-futurism then informed hydrarchy (from below), which is a term that essentially depicts a very specific channel of abolition. Hydrarchy (from below) does not seek out to reform ideals within society due to the pessimism tied to the notion of “progress” within a flawed system, but instead seeks to overthrow the system in question. As an inverse term it specifically emerged in the 17th century when describing the pirate forces that had defected from whichever nation to create a new nation at sea aimed at undermining and destroying the efforts of hydrarchy from the British, French, Portuguese etc. It encapsulates the soul of my practice – this idea of shipwrecking, of destroying with purpose in order to attain something seemingly impossible.
“I specifically have to thank Christina Sharpe, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Simone Browne, Kathryn Yussof, Dionne Brand and Joy James for their works which have informed my comprehension of possible optimism (not to be mistaken for hope), for exploring methods to evade surveillance, the paradox of Blackness assimilating and Blackness’ fungibility.”
7. As you’re about to embark on your six-month bespoke residency in Italy, what are you most looking forward to; most apprehensive of; and what do you hope to get out of it?
“After my residency in Italy, I will be opening my first institutional show in Germany at Kunsthalle Münster this winter, which I think will be one of my most ambitious projects to date. Soon after, I will also finally open my first duo show in the US at ICA Philadelphia. This project has been delayed since the beginning of the pandemic so I’m incredibly excited to finally bring it life!”
8. Where do you see yourself in ten years’ time?
“If the world is still habitable and in recovery, I very much hope to still be making art with as much fire and passion as I do now. I’d also hope to be working at a much healthier pace and have a healthier relationship with the art industry, but perhaps that is too hopeful!
“I do still see myself living and working between different countries, – probably still within a European framework. But, if I dare to dream, I would also want to return to the Caribbean – particularly St Lucia, which is where my family are from.”
Photography courtesy of Dominique White.
