Translating Space, Memory and Black Archives – Reflections on Theaster Gates at White Cube

This week, my creative journey led me to the White Cube Gallery to experience Theaster Gates: 1965: Malcolm in Winter – A Translation Exercise. Gates’ work is known for blending architecture, craft, and archive into spatial narratives. Experiencing this exhibition in person allowed me to connect his approach to my own creative concerns around space, identity, and cultural memory, particularly in relation to Black and diasporic experiences.

Material as Memory

Gates does not just use materials; he activates them as carriers of memory. Burned wooden panels, bricks, pews, and salvaged fragments become political objects. In Malcolm in Winter, the presence of Malcolm X is not literal but translated through space and abstraction. Gates creates an atmosphere of reflection by allowing materials to speak for themselves.

This idea of translation resonates with my design thinking. Like Gates, I consider materials as more than functional. They are embedded with context, emotion, and history. His work supports my belief that space can hold memory and act as a site of cultural transmission (Gates, 2024).

"I’m not interested in making works that are just beautiful. I’m interested in the residue of Blackness in the world" (Gates, 2024).

Black Space as Resistance

What I found most powerful was Gates’ transformation of the White Cube itself. Traditionally, the gallery space is sterile and associated with Eurocentric narratives. By inserting Black cultural memory into this setting, Gates offers a kind of architectural resistance.

This act of reclaiming space relates to the writing of bell hooks, who emphasised the importance of “location” in cultural identity (hooks, 1990). Gates does not merely showcase Blackness within institutional settings. He reconfigures the spatial language, allowing the work to challenge power structures from within.

As a designer with Cameroonian roots, born in France and now based in the UK, I am often navigating institutional spaces where Blackness is marginal. Gates’ work reinforced the possibility of making those spaces not just accessible, but culturally and politically meaningful.

The Archive as a Living Practice

One of the most interesting elements of the exhibition was its approach to the archive. Gates does not treat archives as static collections but as evolving, emotional, and participatory. This aligns with the work of Saidiya Hartman (2008) and Tina Campt (2017), who frame the Black archive as something fragmented and full of imaginative gaps.

By abstracting Malcolm X’s legacy into form, Gates moves away from representation and into spatial storytelling. This process mirrors how I navigate my own identity, often split across languages, countries, and cultural frameworks. I view design as an act of translation, and Gates offers a model for how this can be done with sensitivity and purpose.

How It Informs My Practice

This exhibition reminded me that design must be rooted in cultural understanding. Gates’ use of salvaged materials encourages me to reconsider the environmental and historical weight of the objects I use. His spatial language, full of repetition and silence, showed me how art can hold grief, resistance, and hope at once.

In my own future work, I want to integrate more tactile narratives into interior design. I am particularly interested in non-linear storytelling within space, where users engage with the history and emotion of a place rather than simply walking through it.

References

Campt, T. (2017) Listening to Images. Durham: Duke University Press.

Eshun, K. (2003) ‘Further considerations on Afrofuturism’, CR: The New Centennial Review, 3(2), pp. 287–302.

Gates, T. (2024) 1965: Malcolm in Winter – A Translation Exercise. White Cube. Available at: https://whitecube.com/exhibitions/exhibition/theaster_gates_london_2024 (Accessed: March 2025).

Hartman, S. (2008) Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

hooks, b. (1990) Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End Press.

White Cube (2024) Theaster Gates: 1965: Malcolm in Winter. Available at: https://whitecube.com/exhibitions/exhibition/theaster_gates_london_2024 (Accessed: March 2025).