Margaret Tait Award Announcement and Screening: Alberta Whittle, between a whisper and a cry at GFF19

World premiere of the 2018/​19 Margaret Tait Award commission by Alberta Whittle, between a whisper and a cry, which seeks to challenge conditions of racialised abjection and find new methods for refusal. A chief linkage in this refusal 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. between a whisper speaks of memory, trauma, tensions between the land, the sea and the weather, which reveal the precarity and privilege of geography.

The recipient of the 2019/​20 Margaret Tait Award will be announced at the screening.

Born in Barbados and currently resident in Glasgow, Alberta Whittle is an artist, researcher and educator. Her practice is motivated by the desire to work collectively towards radical self-love. Informed by diasporic conversations, she considers radical self-love a key method in decolonization for people of colour to battle anti-blackness. Her practice involves choreographing interactive installations, using film, sculpture and performance as site-specific artworks in public and private spaces.

Whittle’s work has been exhibited internationally at venues including the Johannesburg Pavillion at the 56^th Venice Biennale; Galerie de l’UQAM, Quebec; BOZAR, Belgium; Intermedia and David Dale Gallery, Glasgow; National Art Gallery of the Bahamas; VAN Lagos, Nigeria; the Apartheid Museum, Goethe on Main and Constitution Hill, South Africa. In 2018, Alberta will be an Associate Artist at the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) in Glasgow and a Fellow at RAW Académie in Dakar, Senegal. She will be presenting her research at The Showroom in London as part of Holding Space in April 2018. She has also been a Committee Member of Transmission Gallery since 2016.