CCA Derry~Londonderry is delighted to present its first online digital residency of 2021 by artist, researcher and curator Alberta Whittle, entitled Creating Dangerously. Over the course of the week, Alberta will be sharing new and existing work, and items of research into Ireland’s plantation history and how its legacy is still apparent in the country today.

Viewable online here (click on the date bar half-way down the page).

The title of Alberta’s residency makes reference to Haitan writer Edwidge Danticat’s Create Dangerously, inspired by Albert Camus’ book of the same name. In her writing, Danticat meditates on the lived experience of an immigrant artist by telling stories of those that have managed to thrive and create in spite of the harrowing events they had gone through in their home countries before leaving, and how the ties with their origins transcend time and distance.

… creating as a revolt against silence, creating when both the creation and the reception, the writing and the reading, are dangerous undertakings, disobedience to a directive.
– Edwidge Danticat, Create Dangerously (2010)

Content from Alberta will be posted daily throughout the week on cca-derry-londonderry.org, with some work being removed after 23 May 2021.

This project is made possible by support from Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Derry City & Strabane District Council and Art Fund.

Alberta was awarded a Turner Bursary, the Frieze Artist Award and a Henry Moore Foundation Artist Award in 2020. Alberta is a Research Associate at The University of Johannesburg. She was a RAW Academie Fellow at RAW Material in Dakar in 2018 and is the Margaret Tait Award winner for 2018/9.

Her creative practice is motivated by the desire to manifest self-compassion and collective care as key methods in battling anti-blackness. She choreographs interactive installations, using film, sculpture and performance as site-specific artworks in public and private spaces.

Alberta has exhibited and performed in various solo and group shows, including at Grand Union (2020), Eastside Projects (2020), DCA (2019), GoMA, Glasgow (2019), Pig Rock Bothy at the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh (2019), 13th Havana Biennale, Cuba (2019), The Tyburn Gallery, London (2019), The City Arts Centre, Edinburgh (2019), The Showroom, London (2018), National Art Gallery of the Bahamas (2018), RAW Material, Dakar (2018), FADA Gallery, Johannesburg (2018), the Apartheid Museum, Johannesburg (2017), FRAMER FRAMED, Amsterdam (2015), Goethe On Main, Johannesburg (2015), at the Johannesburg Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale, Venice (2015), and BOZAR, Brussels (2014), amongst others.

Her work has been acquired for the UK National Collections, The Scottish National Gallery Collections, Glasgow Museums Collections and The Contemporary Art Research Collection at Edinburgh College of Art amongst other private collections.

Over 2021, Alberta will be sharing new work as part of Art Night London, British Art Show 9, Liverpool Biennial, business as usual : hostile environment at Glasgow Sculpture Studios and Right of Admission at the University of Johannesburg.

Alberta’s writing has been published in MAP magazine, Visual Culture in Britain, Visual Studies, Art South Africa and Critical Arts Academic Journal.