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Photo by Alberta Whittle, RESET, 2020 (Film still). Co-produced and co-commissioned by Frieze and Forma for the Frieze Artist Award 2020. Courtesy the artist and The Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd., Glasgow and Nicola Vassell Gallery, New York.

Alberta Whittle

Salutations to Soothe Weathered Hearts

July 9 – September 9, 2024
Location

On the High Line at 14th Street

Daily, starting at 5pm

Alberta Whittle is an artist, researcher, and curator known for her site-specific, interactive installations using film, sculpture, and performance. Originally from Barbados and now based in Glasgow, Scotland, Whittle draws from her own diasporic heritage to explore both past and present expressions of racism, colonialism, and migration.

Moving to the UK from Barbados as a teenager dramatically impacted the artist’s personal experience of history, memory, and loss—though she grasped onto evanescent inherited memories of her ancestors and family far away, these histories suddenly felt invalid, erased, and invisible when in a Western environment. The evident gaps between memory and history drive Whittle’s film practice, which is characterized by the use of archival and documentary material, found video from the internet, text, and filmed footage created with a close network of collaborators—artists, choreographers, and performers. Her work surgically opens the wounds of the past to recount histories of slavery, colonialism, and imperialism, not only to address and revise the archive, but also to lay bare the reality that parallel histories are currently being re-lived. In concert with this reckoning, Whittle composes moments of repair, community, belonging, and self-love. Her meditative work considers art’s role in preventing and interrupting cyclical patterns, while encouraging and creating space for feeling and healing.

Salutations to Soothe Weathered Hearts includes two recent films by Whittle, A Black footprint is a beautiful thing (2021) and RESET (2020). A Black footprint is a beautiful thing (11 min., 30 sec.) celebrates the shipworm as an unlikely symbol of anti-colonialism. The otherwise unmemorable organisms, the “termites of the sea,” were known to consume wooden ships used by European imperialists, thus leading Whittle to imagine them as spiritual companions through their anti-colonial efforts. Throughout the film, footage of the shipworm, the sea, the shore, and Whittle herself are connected by the artist’s seemingly omniscient voice as she recites a poem that serves as a sort of incantation or guided meditation.

Filmed across Barbados, South Africa, and Scotland during COVID, RESET (30 min.) responds to concerns and themes that came to the fore during the height of lockdowns—the Black Lives Matter movement, climate change, the global pandemic—and how these issues highlighted inequality and injustices inherent in our world. RESET opens with an invitation to partake in a meditative breathing exercise. Whittle’s call to action becomes particularly poignant when considering the film’s later examination of both the impact of COVID, and force used by police on Black bodies—calling to mind George Floyd’s dying words, “I can’t breathe.” Similar to A Black footprint is a beautiful thing, water and the shoreline play a major role throughout the film; the persistent sound of crashing waves presents a sobering reminder of those once violently taken across the sea from their homes, and those who did not survive the journey, while also providing a meditative soundscape for personal healing.

Curated by Taylor Zakarin, Associate Curator, High Line Art.

Artist bio

Alberta Whittle (b. 1980, Bridgetown, Barbados) lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland. Her extensive range of exhibitions include solo presentations at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, Pennsyvania (2024, with Dominique White); Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California (2023); Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, Scotland (2023); Holburne Museum, Bath, UK (2023); Scotland + Venice, 59th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy (2022); University of Johannesburg Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa (2021); Jupiter Artland, Edinburgh, Scotland (2021); Glasgow International, Glasgow, Scotland (2021); Grand Union, Birmingham, UK (2020); and Dunde Contemporary Arts, UK (2019). Selected group exhibitions include Soulscapes, Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, UK (2024); Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance, The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK (2023); Soft and weak like water, 14th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, South Korea (2023); British Art Show 9, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, UK (2021-2022); Moving Bodies, Moving Images, Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (2022); Black Melancholia, CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY (2022); Sex Ecologies, Kunsthall Trondheim, Trondheim, Norway (2021); and Life between islands: Caribbean British Art 1950s – Now, Tate Britain, London, UK (2021). Whittle has received a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award (2022), a Turner Bursary (2020), Frieze Artist Award (2020), a Henry Moore Foundation Artist Award (2020), and Margaret Tait Award (2018-19). Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Advanced Research Centre, University of Glasgow; Arts Council Collection; Art Gallery of Ontario; Edinburgh College of Art; Glasgow Museums Collection; Government Art Collection; McManus Museum, Dundee; National Galleries of Scotland; and the University of St Andrews.


Support

Lead support for High Line Art comes from Amanda and Don Mullen.

Major support is provided by Shelley Fox Aarons and Philip E. Aarons, The Brown Foundation, Inc. of Houston, and Charina Endowment Fund.

High Line Art is supported, in part, with public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the New York City Council, under the leadership of Speaker Adrienne Adams.

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