Event overview
DUE TO UNFORESEEN CIRCUMSTANCES THIS EVENT WILL NOT TAKE PLACE. WE HOPE TO ARRANGE A FUTURE DATE.
Alberta Whittle’s creative practice is motivated by the desire to work collectively towards radical self-love. Informed by diasporic conversations, she considers radical self-love and collective care key methods in battling anti-blackness. Her practice involves choreographing interactive installations, using film, sculpture and performance as site-specific artworks in public and private spaces.
Aiming to develop a visual, oral and textual language that questions accepted Western constructs of history and society, Whittle’s work is undertaken with an acute understanding of how formal historical records produced by privileged white men, have always sought to replace more ancient and informal ways of comprehending the past. Whittle’s wider research questions the authority of postcolonial power, its implications and its legacy; it considers conditions in the afterlife of slavery, where the racialised black body can become suspended in a state of stress that directly impacts upon physical, mental and emotional health. Within her work, the artist connects these ideas of black oppression with meditations on survival; championing the idea of healing as self-liberation.
‘When I do these performances it’s about this idea of evoking a spectre. I use the phrase “the luxury of amnesia”. Growing up in the Caribbean, I can speak to grandparents and they can tell me about ancestors being raped in the fields, they can tell me about the different plantations that people worked on, so it really is a luxury of amnesia when I’m in Scotland and I’m encountering all this colonial history which is largely going unrecognized.’
How Flexible Can We Make the Mouth - her solo show at Dundee Contemporary Art until November 24th - refers to Whittle’s current preoccupation with healing, writing, breath and orality. Looking at the relationship between historical written testimonies and ancestral knowledge shared through oral traditions, Whittle uses video and performance to create direct encounters with audiences, encouraging mutual empathy, learning, and understanding. (Dundee Contemporary Arts website 2019)
Alberta Whittle (b.1980, Bridgetown, Barbados) lives and works in Glasgow. She received her MFA from Glasgow School of Art in 2011 and is a PhD candidate at Edinburgh College of Art. Whittle was the 2018 recipient of The Margaret Tait Award. Recent shows: 13th Havana Biennial, Cuba (2019), GoMA, Glasgow (2019), The City Arts Centre, Edinburgh (2019), The Showroom, London (2018), National Art Gallery of the Bahamas (2018), RAW Material, Dakar (2018), FADA Gallery, Johannesburg (2018), the Apartheid Museum, Johannesburg (2017), FRAMER FRAMED, Amsterdam (2015), Goethe On Main, Johannesburg (2015), at the Johannesburg Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale, Venice (2015), and BOZAR, Brussels (2014). She is a Committee Member at Transmission Gallery Glasgow and Board Member of SCAN (Scottish Creative Art Network).
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 23 Oct 2019 | 5:30pm - 7:00pm |
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