alberta whittle
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How Flexible Can We Make the Mouth

How Flexible Can We Make the Mouth

This exhibition marked Barbadian-Scottish artist Alberta Whittle’s first major solo exhibition in a UK institution, drawing together new and recent artworks in film, sculpture, print, installation and performance to reflect on memory, trauma, weather and tensions between the land and sea.
Whittle’s interdisciplinary practice aims to develop a visual, oral and textual language that questions accepted Western constructs of history and society. This 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. The artist’s wider research questions the authority of postcolonial power, its implications and its legacy.
Whittle’s work often 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.
How Flexible Can We Make the Mouth refers to Whittle’s current preoccupation with healing, writing, breath and orality. Writing has always been an integral part of her practice and the texts she produces are meant to be read aloud, to be heard as well as seen. She also works rhythmically in relation to writing and reading, particularly looking at punctuation marks as visual signifiers of shifts in breath and breathing. Looking at the relationship between historical written testimonies and ancestral knowledge shared through oral traditions, the artist will be using video and performance to create direct encounters with audiences, encouraging mutual empathy, learning, and understanding.
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Matrix Moves

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​This installation engages principally  with the stereotypes of the Caribbean and the  tropical  as an exotic playground of pleasure and colour. Drawing on a palate that stems from a Caribbean vernacular rooted in architecture, bright contrasting colours are used as a way of thinking about how things can be obscured through veneer, masquerade and projection -- just as the Caribbean itself has been eroticised, distorted and misrepresented through external western perspectives. 
 
Central to the work is a black figure, performing an impossibly low "Limbo". While intrinsically tied to perceptions of the Caribbean, connoting leisure and pleasure, the routes of this dance floor competition are believed to be much darker.  Limbo is  believed to have originated in  the hellish hulls of  slave ships due to the need to bend  and contort the body  around  beams in floors to low to stand -- and sometimes too low even to comfortably kneel. 
 
In this carnival scene, the  bar is  set impossibly low, and inevitably the bar is down. A failure in a game that was rigged from the start. For all its riotous colour the scene itself and the title "matrix moves" (a named move from Dance  Hall  culture)  point to the immeasurably harder  hurdles set for people of colour in making their way  through life  in  our  current  societal  climate. 
 
Not only were the emancipated and their descendants forced into playing a western controlled game in trying to live and survive but they have been forced to play it another language.  The cast bronze tongue refers here  to the loss of  many  languages under the pressure  to speak the language of  the coloniser, the legacy of which is people such as the artist herself who still speak English alone or as a dominant language where they were born.

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  • Home
  • BIOGRAPHY
  • Works
    • Installation >
      • Life Support
      • RESET
      • How flexible can we make the mouth
      • Transparency
    • Collages >
      • Business as Usual
    • Film >
      • What sound does the black atlantic make
      • A Study in Vocal Intonation
      • Sorry, not Sorry
      • from the forest to the concrete (to the forest)
      • You Can Never Touch the Same Water Twice
      • Mammmmmmmywata Presents Life Solutions International
    • Lessons in Welcome
    • Performances >
      • Impossibility of Return
      • A Recipe for Planters Punch
      • Go Home / No Home
      • In Transit
      • Right of Admission
      • Right of Admission Part 2
      • Right of Admission Part 3
      • Right of Admission Part 4
      • Right of Admission Part 5
      • Big Red aka Bertie
      • The Cradle
    • Curatorial Projects >
      • INTERMISSION
  • NEWS/PRESS
  • Contact