Nine nights; Strange fruit brings together a new body of paintings by London-based artist Shaqúelle Whyte that trace the emotional and temporal reverberations of familial grief. Rather than unfolding as a linear account, the exhibition forms a constellation of moments that draw upon the Jamaican funerary tradition of Nine Nights and the historic resonance of the protest song ‘Strange Fruit’. Across these works, figures fracture, double and ripple, compressing multiple temporalities within a single visual field. Whyte’s expansive compositions arise from an intuitive process in which, as the artist notes, ‘the canvas starts telling you what to do’– a mode of making that calls forth an affective terrain in which loss, love and memory converge.
