Alberta Whittle

Edited during the BLM rebellions in June 2020, HOLDING THE LINE connects with Saidiya Hartman’s research on waywardness - dreaming and longing for a whole life nurtured in self-compassion, possibility and love, outside of the spectre of racialised violence and surveillance. Curious about how hope for survival, joy and release can manifest in the face of intersecting violences, HOLDING THE LINE suggests the following questions: Is the ability to live free a dream? What WILL freedom feel like?

Disrupting binaries of identity, Mammmmmmmywata represents a hybrid identity, personifying a culture of mixedness, rooted in both miscegenation and love. She has landed in Scotland, appearing in videos, encouraging us to get WOKE, advertising her powers to decolonize from within and demanding REPARATIONS NOW... The convenient amnesia of Scotland in disavowing its role within the slave trade is a significant cause for concern, necessitating a demand for reparations, #BITCH BETTER HAVE MY MONEY. This amnesia is a systematic form of oppression, which promotes and maintains institutional racism, gifting privilege and denying access to the Other. It is time to wake up. This is real. Got to get WOKE. Decolonization is coming…

In the words of Christina Sharpe, a "visually and sonically rich" work inspired by Dionne Brand's "A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging." Commissioned by Hayward Gallery Touring and The Box, Plymouth, for British Art Show 9.

‘Lagareh’ – which translates from the Mandinka language as ​‘The Last Born’ – is a work anchored around theories of abolition, rebellion, ancestral knowledge and love. Shot in Scotland, England, Barbados, Sierra Leone and Italy, the film melds a collection of scenes that give focus to the strength of contemporary Black womxn, whose individual acts of resistance are bound together through the artist’s conceptual storytelling. The artist situates Black love in proximity with historical sites of trauma, re-inscribed with rage, hope and exhaustion. Gestures, rituals and moments of intimacy are poignantly underpinned by a deep reflection on grief, loss and mourning, a resolute reminder of the trauma inflicted upon the Black body and of white privilege and power.

A working iteration of the project "business as usual : hostile environment". Originally co-commissioned with Glasgow Sculpture Studios as part of Event Scotland’s Year of Coasts and Waters, the project was conceived to explore Glasgow’s Forth and Clyde Canal as both a literal and poetic route through which to reflect on the role of waterways in the voluntary and involuntary movement of people. Reworking aspects of the new film at speed and in light of the Covid-19 outbreak, Whittle powerfully incorporates archival footage relating to the UK’s Windrush scandal as well as material highlighting the role of immigrants in the NHS as they tackle the virus, foregrounding how political and ecological climates intersect and shape one another.

The 2018/19 Margaret Tait Award commission by Alberta Whittle. Whittle’s film seeks to challenge conditions of racialised abjection and find new methods for refusal. A chief linkage is the sonic cosmologies found in Kamau Brathwaite’s research on ‘tidalectics’, and Christina Sharpe’s work on The Weather. Sharpe positions The Weather as a lens to understand the inescapable conditions within the afterlife of slavery, while Brathwaite’s theories of ‘tidalectics’ expose the performativity of sound, revealing memories of transoceanic life.

Featured in the We Are History exhibition, Alberta Whittle's from the forest to the concrete (to the forest) (2019) was developed during the aftermath of Hurricane Dorian in 2019. Whittle interweaves performance with footage of the cyclone's destruction, calling upon viewers to reflect upon their relative comfort living in the UK and elsewhere, in contrast to the destructive impact of the weather and societal inequalities affecting other parts of the world.

What sound does the Black Atlantic make, 2019 is imagined as a visual and sonic concomitance of racial infrastructures and refusal. We witness the mechanisms of state designed to stretch and pull Black bodies into mechanisms that absorb shock but find space to decipher the joy and resistance in Black life.