Dominique White (b. 1993) 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 feels weighty, like 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 the warship, the cargo carrier, the asylum seekers’ vessel, the fishing boat, the luxury yacht, and a space-faring rocket. It is a machine that mutates continuously to adapt to maintain 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 down and stability becomes precarious. The ship, once a structure of containment and direction, begins to fail. Its breakdown is not contained. It draws the whole system into disarray. The hunger that once drove it turns inward. Collapse begins at the center: the machinery of extraction starts to grind through its interior, making the hold, built to contain and manage life, the site where the system devours what keeps it afloat.

White’s sculptures inhabit this moment of turning. They hold the weight of collapse without resolution. Their presence is dense and unresolved. Iron, rope, fabric, and other materials remain in process. Surfaces oxidize. Fragments hold tension. The sculptures refuse closure. Instead, they accumulate traces. They record abrasion and hold on to the aftermath. What survives reveals through the cracks that expose the conditions of its resilience.