Whitechapel Gallery, London
Woven throughout this compelling collection of sculptures from the Max Mara prizewinner is a ferrous thread of hooks and spikes that drags the cruel history of slavery to the surface
Enter Dominique White’s tolling sea-bell of an exhibition and you will be hooked, then dragged down deep. Four big sculptures are dimly illuminated in a gallery creeping with blue shadows. It is meant to feel as if you are under the sea. Give it time and you will believe you are probing tangled fragments of a shipwreck. Tendrils curl in and out of a sunken cannon. A humanoid hunk of driftwood lashes at you with red swirling tentacles bearing sharp steely points.
Nautical history fascinates London-born White, 31. As winner of the Max Mara art prize for women, she received a six-month residency in Italy to research and develop this show. A film, with the glossy production standards you’d expect of the Max Mara fashion house, shows her exploring the vast harbour of Genoa with its 16th-century lighthouse. It includes interviews with leading Italian scholars of the history of the Mediterranean; one of them quotes Fernand Braudel’s classic work The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II.
