Deadweight

27 October 2024 – 16 February 2025

Dominique White, winner of the ninth edition of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women, presents Deadweight, a body of works made in 2024. After a premiere at Whitechapel Gallery in London (2 July – 15 September 2024), White has conceived a new exhibition design adapted to the spaces of Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia.

A thought-provoking exploration of rebellion and transformation, Deadweight comprises four large-scale sculptural works which pursue the artist's interest in creating new worlds for Blackness, as well as her fascination with the metaphoric potency and regenerative power of the sea.
The title Deadweight derives from a nautical term that compresses everything on a ship into a single unit, one which determines the ship’s ability to float and function as intended. White deliberately inverts this concept, offering disruption as opposed to stability – a reckoning with the tipping point of the ship, to offer the possibility of emancipation through abolition.
The works combine force and fragility: undulating angular structures in which metals have been manipulated into shapes evocative of anchors, a ship's hull, mammal carcasses or skeletons. They are lost or abandoned material forms that, through White’s treatment, become symbols of defiance.

As part of the process, the sculptures were immersed in the Mediterranean Sea: an act that was both physical and poetic, to explore the transformative effect of water on material objects. The resulting forms display the rust and oxidation of the metal and the fragmentation of organic elements such as sisal, raffia and driftwood, while carrying the lingering scent of seawater.

The new commission weaves together concepts of Afrofuturism, Afro-pessimism and Hydrarchy – philosophies central to White’s artistic investigation and practice. Her work envisions an Afro future located outside of traditional utopian science fiction, in an oceanic realm with the potential to offer fluid, rebellious realities, liberated from capitalist and colonial influence. White’s sculptures, or ‘beacons’, recall sea-bound, imagined worlds which prophesize the emergence of the Stateless: “a [Black] future that hasn’t yet happened, but must.”

Deadweight developed out of White’s winning proposal for the ninth edition of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women, and was made during a six-month residency organized by Collezione Maramotti.
Specifically tailored to support, inform and help realize the work, this residency allowed White to travel through Agnone, Palermo, Genoa, Milan and Todi, where she worked with academics, researchers and specialists in naval and maritime history and the Mediterranean slave trade, visited historic foundries and artisan workshops and learned new skills from experts in historic, traditional and contemporary metalworking techniques. A brief documentary, available online, describes the artist’s residency experience in Italy.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue containing essays by Alexis Pauline Gumb and Olamiju Fajemisin, a conversation between the artist and Bina von Stauffenberg and three poems by June Jordan.


The biannual Max Mara Art Prize for Women was established in 2005 and is a collaboration between Whitechapel Gallery, Max Mara and since 2007 Collezione Maramotti. It is the only visual art prize of its kind for UK-based emerging women-identifying artists, aimed at promoting and nurturing them at a crucial stage in their careers through increased visibility, and by giving them the space, time and resources to develop an ambitious new work.

The previous prize winners are: Emma Talbot, Helen Cammock, Emma Hart, Corin Sworn, Laure Prouvost, Andrea Büttner, Hannah Rickards and Margaret Salmon.

The judging panel for the ninth Max Mara Art Prize for Women was chaired by curator Bina von Stauffenberg, with a jury of art-world experts comprising gallerist Rózsa Farkas, artist Claudette Johnson, writer Derica Shields, collector Maria Sukkar and Whitechapel Gallery Director Gilane Tawadros.

27 October 2024 – 16 February 2025

Free admission to the exhibition during the opening hours:
Thursday and Friday, 2:30 pm – 6:30 pm
Saturday and Sunday, 10:30 am – 6:30 pm

Closed: 1 November, 25–26 December, 1 and 6 January