Becoming fugitive state: Dominique White
24 September – 23 October
Free & open to all
Dominique's studio during her residency at La Becque between May and July 2021.
Dominique White’s art practice dredges the ‘Shipwreck(ed)’ from the bottom of the sea. Teeming with life while bereft of it, clusters of shells, raffia and clay cling to hooks and ropes to testify Black transoceanic histories and futurities that exist in excess of time. To date, Dominique has been exploring what she calls the ‘Shipwreck(ed)’: ‘a self-reflexivity and a state of being’. Perilously pulled into suspension, her works perform what Black feminist scholar Tina Campt calls ‘a politics of prefiguration that involves living the future now’.
For Becoming fugitive state, Dominique presents a series of old and new drawings that dives further into the intangible, leaving the ‘Shipwreck(ed)’ for a ‘Shipwreck(ing)’. She turns to the present participle to ‘uncontain’ the shipwreck; to work through what Saidiya Hartman calls ‘the diffusion of terror’ that shapes Black becoming. Poet and Black studies scholar Fred Moten offers an addendum: ‘There is no remembering, no healing. There is, rather, a perpetual cutting.’
Her materials in this project are pared down to paper, chalk and kaolin clay. Shifting her weight from the Afrofuturistic object-promises of her sculptures, she lands on mutable, sketchier territories / terror-tories of impossibility. Always already embodied in Blackness, impossibility is as much lived in everyday horrors as it is beyond comprehension. From unrealised propositions to tenous markmaking, Dominique attempts to (dis)articulate what can’t be—but is.
Dominique White is a graduate of Goldsmiths, University of London and Central Saint Martins. Recent exhibitions include Blackness in Democracy's Graveyard at UKS, Oslo (2021), Techno Worlds, produced by Goethe-Institut, at Art Quarter Budapest (2021); Possédé·e·s at MO.CO, Montpellier (2020–21); and Boundary + Gesture at Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge (2019). She was awarded the Roger Pailhas Prize in 2019 in conjunction with her solo show at VEDA, Florence (2019) and received awards from Artangel and the Henry Moore Foundation in 2020. Dominique was in residency at Sagrada Mercancía (Santiago, Chile), Triangle France – Astérides (Marseille, France) and La Becque (La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland) in 2020 and 2021.