Dominique White: Deadweight, Whitechapel Gallery review - sculptures that seem freighted with history

It’s been a long time since the Whitechapel Gallery has presented three seriously good exhibitions at the same time. Already reviewed are Gavin Jantjes’ paintings on show in the main gallery. He is now joined, in gallery 2, by Dominique White, winner of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women and in galleries 5, 6 & 7, by Peter Kennard.

Funded by the Max Mara Fashion Group, the Art Prize provides the winner with a six month residency in Italy and, in an interesting film, White describes the research she was able to carry out during that time. The four powerful sculptures now on show were inspired by the places she visited in Italy and the things she learned there.

Dead Reckoning (pictured below right) is like a sign writer’s tag expanded into 3D. Lengths of rusty iron tubing pierce the air as if in a gestural frenzy that has the explosive energy of graffiti. Spiky lines semaphore a message of angry defiance that seems to say: “I am here and I refuse to remain invisible.” Standing at the entrance to the exhibition, the work functions like the artist’s calling card. The message seems to be collective as well as personal, though; it’s as if White were speaking for all those whose voices have been stifled throughout history, as well as on her own behalf.

Dating right back to ancient Egypt and beyond, the Mediterranean slave trade was one of the topics she researched. Her sculptures evoke thoughts of shipwreck and the slaves who rowed Phoenician, Greek and Roman galleys. If the warship to which they were shackled went down, the slaves sank with it and were drowned. White is attracted to iron as a material because its presence in a wreck, she says, “is one of the signifiers that a ship was a slave ship”.

In Ineligible for Death (main picture) two chunks of driftwood rest across one another like the heavy limbs of lifeless bodies. Penetrated by loops of curling iron, they lie pinioned on the floor as if dredged up from the sea bed where they’ve rested for millennia. To heighten the sense of prolonged decay, the artist immersed the sculptures in the Mediterranean and allowed seawater to corrode and corrupt the materials until they resemble the remains of a shipwreck.

With its frayed ropes, fragments of rotten sails, discarded fishing nets and worm-eaten driftwood, Split Obliteration, 2024 makes specific reference to seafaring. This profoundly melancholy work seems steeped in history, yet it emanates a potent sense of resilience. And, for White, confronting the past enables her to envisage “a (Black) future that hasn’t yet happened, but must.” The intention, she says, is to make works “that are dilapidated and falling apart to create hope, an alternative future born from the ashes of the present. There is no escape except through destruction.” Unforgettable.

• Dominique White: Deadweight at the Whitechapel Gallery until 15 September
• More visual arts reviews on theartsdesk