Alberta Whittle Shares Offerings of Black Healing with Salutations to Soothe Weathered Hearts Film Exhibition on the High Line

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

The High Line announced the upcoming presentation of Salutations to Soothe Weathered Hearts, an exhibition of two meditative films by Alberta Whittle, the Barbadian-Scottish artist who represented Scotland in the 2022 Venice Biennale. The two films in the exhibition, A Black footprint is a beautiful thing (2021) and RESET (2020), will screen daily starting at 5pm on the High Line at 14th Street from July 9 through September 10, 2024.

“Alberta Whittle beautifully weaves together juxtaposing moments of conflict and quiet; her films present a powerful balancing act, confronting us with racist histories and their remaining legacies, while also creating space for peace and renewal,” said Taylor Zakarin, associate curator for High Line Art, who organized the exhibition. “It’s an honor to have these works on view on High Line Channel, where Whittle’s echoing voice will summon visitors from up and down the High Line like a siren.”

The films in Salutations to Soothe Weathered Hearts serve as reckonings with the horrors and oppression of the transatlantic slave trade, police violence, and the COVID-19 pandemic while also providing poetic offerings of redress of and healing from those experiences. 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.

A Black footprint is a beautiful thing (11 minutes, 30 seconds) 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. Throughout A Black footprint is a beautiful thing, 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. In both A Black footprint is a beautiful thing and RESET, water and the shoreline play a major role.

RESET (30 minutes), filmed across Barbados, South Africa, and Scotland during the COVID-19 pandemic, responds to concerns and themes that came to the fore during the height of lockdowns—the Black Lives Matter movement, climate change, the global public health crisis—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.”

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.

RESET was co-produced and co-commissioned by Frieze and Forma for the Frieze Artist Award 2020.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
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, PA (2024, with Dominique White); Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA (2023); Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, Scotland (2023); Holburne Museum, Bath, United Kingdom (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 Dundee 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.

ABOUT HIGH LINE ART

Founded in 2009, High Line Art commissions and produces a wide array of artworks on the High Line, including site-specific commissions, exhibitions, performances, video programs, and a series of billboard interventions. Led by Cecilia Alemani, the Donald R. Mullen, Jr. Director & Chief Curator of High Line Art, and presented by the High Line, the art program invites artists to think of creative ways to engage with the unique architecture, history, and design of the park, and to foster a productive dialogue with the surrounding neighborhood and urban landscape.

For more information on High Line Art, please visit thehighline.org/art.

ABOUT THE HIGH LINE

The High Line is both a nonprofit organization and a public park on the West Side of Manhattan. Through our work with communities on and off the High Line, we’re devoted to reimagining public spaces to create connected, healthy neighborhoods and cities.

Built on a historic, elevated rail line, the High Line was always intended to be more than a park. You can walk through the gardens, view art, experience a performance, enjoy food or beverage, or connect with friends and neighbors—all while enjoying a unique perspective of New York City.

Nearly 100% of our annual budget comes through donations. The High Line is owned by the City of New York and we operate under a license agreement with NYC Parks.

For more information, visit thehighline.org and follow us on Facebook, X, Instagram.

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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