DOMINIQUE WHITE

Dominique White transforms the galleries of Kunsthalle Basel into a series of charged environments with her sculptures. Moving through All Great Powers Collapse from the Centre evokes the feeling of submersion. The space carries the weight of water, as if walking along an ocean floor where orientation shifts and measures begin to dissolve. What appears are not intact objects but remnants. These are fractured bodies and broken structures, shaped by corrosion and bearing the marks of rupture. They resist classification. They resemble evidence of a collapse that has already begun.

At the center of this exhibition is the figure of the ship. Not a single vessel, but a shifting and layered form. The ship emerges as a motif of organized power, extraction, movement, and border-making. It is a warship, cargo carrier, asylum seekers’ vessel, colonial transport, and a space-faring rocket. It is a machine that updates itself continuously, always adapting to new regimes of control.

The exhibition unfolds like a threshold space, a kind of shoal. It is a zone where currents collide and where surfaces abrade. It marks the meeting of sea and land, of violence and escape, of the sublime and the threatening. In this space, movement slows and stability becomes precarious. Directions are no longer fixed. The ship, once a structure of containment and direction, begins to fail. Its breakdown is not clean. It draws the whole system into disarray. The hunger that once drove it turns inward. Collapse begins at the centre: the machinery of extraction starts to grind through its own interior, making the hold, built to contain and manage life, the site where the system devours what keeps it afloat