Nine Nights; Strange Fruit brings together a series of new paintings by London-based artist Shaquelle Whyte that trace the emotional and temporal impact of family grief. Rather than unfolding as a linear narrative, the exhibition draws on the historical resonance of the Jamaican funerary tradition Nine Nights and the protest song “Strange Fruit” to form a series of moments. In these works, figures fragment, ghost, and ripple, compressing multiple temporalities within a single vision. White’s expansive compositions result from an intuitive process in which, as the artist notes, “the canvas begins to tell you what to do”—a creative mode that creates emotional realms where loss, love, and memory come together.
“Nine Nights” refers to the Jamaican tradition of combining celebration and mourning in a long wake. The tradition’s introduction from its West African origins into Jamaica and wider diaspora practice marks the spiritual entry into another realm – heaven in Christian eschatology, or, in a colonial or Rastafarian sense, a symbolic return to the homeland. White treats this tradition in a non-linear way, seeing it as a starting point for the fragmentation of family history and emotional legacy into new timelines. “Strange Fruit,” also referenced in the exhibition’s title, borrows from a 1939 poem popularized in songs by Billie Holiday and later Nina Simone to protest racial violence against African Americans. For White, the line was less an overt political statement than a gesture of recognition—“I know you, I see you”—an acknowledgment of the black lives taken and a pointed allusion to the artist’s grandfather’s premature death due to corporate negligence the year before he was born.
Throughout the exhibition, figures split, converge and repeat, reflecting the dissonance of mourning and the fractured quality of diasporic identity. As cultural theorist Stuart Hall points out, diasporic identities are formed through “continuous ‘plays’ of history, culture and power.” White’s paintings inhabit this changing terrain, reshaping what Hall calls “forgotten connections”: connections to ancestors never met, rituals that span distances, and emotional legacies that outlast previous generations. These works are grounded in the artist’s own family past and do not claim to represent all black experiences; rather, they illuminate individual trajectories within the fabric of diasporic life.
Scenes of funeral rituals appear repeatedly in the painting. exist On to the next one: Breakup (2025), coffin bearers emerge or descend from the misty abyss, while another large-scale work, in shubz (2025), an open coffin scene is staged in an eerily pale room. The emptiness of the room becomes the main theme of the painting, except for the arrangement of white, etiolated flowers, whose transitions into smudged colors evoke the impression of memory blurring into abstraction. The painting’s imagery can be linked to public visitations during the civil rights era, where open casket visits became acts of protest and collective witness. The artist, who never met his grandfather, noted that “it would be dishonest to depict him” and took an ethical stance that acknowledged the limitations of representation. This gesture evokes Hall’s insistence that representation is not “outside the event, not after the event, but within the event itself.”6actively generate meaning rather than passively reflect meaning.
exist Table 4: Are you really going all out? (2025) Six characters are dressed in different funeral attire, as if they have just returned from the cemetery. Seemingly a fractured iteration of a single theme, this fragment captures the simultaneity of grief, responsibility, and family unity. Recalling the moment of burial back home, when the family collectively dug out the grave and then refilled it—a ritual expression of care in the Jamaican mourning tradition—these figures become visual markers of the passage of time. The painting recalls a film montage or overlay, holding multiple emotional registers within a single frame. Black tie flails, bodies bent in labor or grief, time seems compressed into a concrete dance of loss.
The emotional tone of White’s paintings also changes as the work moves from public ritual to private mourning. The worst things happen at sea “2025” is a smaller-scale work that lends itself to the intimate subject matter of a mother-daughter relationship. Depicting an intimate embrace, the subject’s face turns outward in a moment of unguarded stillness. This direction departs from White’s usual compositional approach, in which figures are often folded inward, their faces obscured. Here, these characters serve as proxies for reflection on changing family dynamics, gender roles, unspoken expectations, and the subtle interpersonal textures that emerge after the loss of a loved one. Although the work is not drawn from direct memory, it constructs a version of reality. As White says, “Painting can reflect our times, but it should not allow the viewer to directly reflect our lives.”
The fictionality embedded in each painting underscores White’s embrace of technique, demonstrated through a flexible handling of time, space, and emotion. A dreamlike atmosphere ensues Form V: Dancing with someone (2025), red beams of light pour down on figures caught between celebration and conflict, dance and pain. Shrouded in a veil of light and shadow, the work depicts the fluctuations, tenderness and contradictions that make up the experience of mourning.
A meditation on mourning and diasporic legacies, Nine Nights; Strange Fruit positions painting as a portal through which the past can be reconfigured and alternative futures seen. White’s paintings are characterized by formal fragmentation and non-linearity, “looking at something from a macro perspective and then exploring it in many micro moments”: his intimate snapshots and fractured subjects participate in the ongoing production of identity as it emerges from rupture, memory and self-representation. They do not demand action but offer recognition: quiet remembrances of a life the artist did not witness but is still feeling.
