Dominique White’s Shipwrecks Surface from the Depths

A ship’s wake marks its traces as they slowly dissipate into the history of the sea. Within the histories of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, these ephemeral remains cause difficulty in reckoning with the lives of the dispossessed. The hauntology of the slave ship – a relic that infiltrates the memory of both the living and the dead – remains in the hold of history’s wake. Grappling with the unresolved, still-unfolding present of slavery’s history, artist Dominique White’s sculptural reimagining of four shipwrecks in her exhibition ‘Deadweight’ at Whitechapel Gallery opens the vault of the sea and throws you directly into this wake.

In March 2023, White won the ninth biennial Max Mara Art Prize for Women, which includes a bespoke residency in Italy and a touring exhibition. Working with ideas of Afrofuturism and nautical imagery, the artist (supported by Max Mara, Whitechapel Gallery and Collezione Maramotti) undertook a six-month research and production journey across the towns and regions of Agnone, Genoa, Nemi and Umbria. This iteration of ‘Deadweight’, White’s first solo exhibition at a major London institution, features four reimagined shipwrecks that appear to have washed up within a dimly lit gallery. As viewers circle these backlit wreckages, the sculptures seem to appear and disappear, the shadows of found shipyard materials – washed-up driftwood, oxidized forged iron, exhausted ropes, raffia and sisal – ominously jutting up out of the surrounding darkness. In the swelling enemy (all works 2024), destroyed sails hang precariously yet ominously from disfigured oxidized iron that sheds a layer of kaolin clay. Each bone-tired, volatile material seems on the verge of collapse.

The exhibition’s title references the maximum combined weight of cargo, fuel and consumables that a ship can carry. Here, White seems to reckon with the futurist possibility of surpassing a vessel’s deadweight tonnage, to sink it and dismantle the legacies of the slave ship. She presents thoughtful conceptualizations on histories of slavery, piracy and hydrachy. During her time in Genoa, she opted to immerse her sculptures in the Mediterranean Sea for one month. Like anchors dragged up to the surface, the works emerged rusted and fragmented. Genoa, notably the birthplace of Christopher Columbus (whose inhumane legacy continues to be celebrated in the city), was a vicious colonial and maritime power during the slave trade. By sinking her sculptures into the sea, White utilized the very vehicle of colonial power and conquest as the weapon of her sculptures’ destruction.

In a film accompanying the exhibition, White anthropomorphically speaks of ‘destroying the skin of metal’ and the problematic historical associations attached to the materials she worked with on this project. Through her research, the artist discovered that the presence of iron ballast in a shipwreck indicates that it was likely a slave vessel. By forging her sculptures in iron, White therefore denotes the presence of Blackness within the visual histories of the slave ship and reconfigures it through, as academic Saidiya Hartman noted in her essay ‘Venus in Two Acts’ (2008), ‘listening for the unsaid, translating misconstrued words, and refashioning disfigured lives’.

For scholar Christina Sharpe: ‘[To] be in the wake is to occupy and to be occupied by the continuous and changing present of slavery’s as yet unresolved unfolding.’ (In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, 2016). As White’s work operates within this wake of a wider critical project of rethinking histories of transatlantic slavery, ‘Deadweight’ reckons with the reclamation of the slave ship as a site of Black presence. White’s sculptures address the impossibility of salvaging the past, while sharing the hope expressed by poet and playwright Derek Walcott in ‘The Sea Is History’ (1979): ‘In the salt chuckle of rocks with their sea pools, there was the sound like a rumour without any echo of History, really beginning.’ – imagining a future that is yet to happen, but must.

Dominique White’s ‘Deadweight’ is on view at Whitechapel Gallery, London, until 15 September

^{Main image: Dominique White, dead reckoning (detail), 2024, forged iron, dimensions variable. Courtesy: the artist; photograph: Matt Greenwood © Above Ground Studio}