‘Nine nights’ refers to the Jamaican tradition in which celebration and mourning unite across an extended wake. Carried from West African origins into Jamaican and wider diasporic practice, the tradition marks the departure of the spirit into another realm – heaven within Christian eschatology, or, in a colonial or Rastafarian sense, a symbolic return to the homeland. Whyte approaches this tradition non-linearly, treating it as a departure point from which family histories and emotional inheritances splinter into new timelines. ‘Strange fruit’ is also invoked in the exhibition’s title, borrowed from the 1939 poem popularised in song by Billie Holiday and later Nina Simone, protesting racial violence enacted against African Americans. For Whyte, the phrase functions less as an overt political assertion than as a gesture of recognition – ‘I know you, I see you’² – that acknowledges the taking of Black life and poignantly alludes to the premature death of the artist’s grandfather due to corporate negligence, the year before he was born. 

Throughout the exhibition, figures split, converge and repeat, mirroring both the dissonance of mourning and the fractured quality of diasporic identity. As cultural theorist Stuart Hall notes, diasporic identity is formed through ‘the continuous ‘play’ of history, culture and power’.³ Whyte’s paintings inhabit this shifting terrain, re-forging what Hall terms ‘forgotten connections’⁴: links to ancestors never met, rituals carried across distance, and emotional inheritances that have outlived the previous generations. Grounded in the artist’s own familial past, these works do not claim to speak for all Black experience; instead, they articulate a personal locus within the textures of diasporic life.  

Scenes of funerary ritual recur across the paintings. In On to the next: the break up (2025), coffin bearers emerge from, or descend into, a clouded abyss, while another large-scale work, In the shubz (2025), stages an open-casket scene in an eerily pallid room. The very emptiness of the room becomes the painting’s subject, save for an arrangement of white, etiolated flowers, where transitions of sfumato evoke the impression of memorial blurring into abstraction. The painting’s imagery may be read in relation to the public visitations of the civil rights era, in which open casket viewings became acts of protest and collective witness. Never having met his grandfather, the artist notes it would be ‘disingenuous to picture him’⁵, adopting an ethical position that acknowledges the limits of representation. It is a gesture that invokes Hall’s insistence that representation is not ‘outside the event, not after the event, but within the event itself’⁶, actively producing meaning rather than passively reflecting it. 

In Form IV: did you really give your all (2025) six figures are depicted in various states of funeral attire as though just returned from the gravesite. Appearing as fractured iterations of a single subject, the fragmentation registers the simultaneity of grief, duty and familial solidarity. Recalling the moment of returning home from the burial, where family members collectively dug out and then refilled the grave – a ritual expression of care within Jamaican mourning traditions – the figures become visual markers of temporal slippage. Recalling filmic montage or superimposition, the painting holds multiple emotional registers within a single frame. Black ties flail, bodies bend in labour or lamentation, and time appears to compress into an embodied choreography of loss. 

The emotional register of Whyte’s paintings shifts as the compositions move from public rites to that of private mourning. Worst things happen at sea (2025) is a smaller-scale work which befits the intimate subject matter of the mother-daughter relationship. Depicting a close embrace, the subjects’ faces turn outwards in an unguarded moment of stillness. This orientation departs from Whyte’s usual compositional approach, in which figures often fold inwards, their faces obscured. Here, the figures act as proxies that permit reflection on shifting familial dynamics, gendered roles, unspoken expectations and the subtle interpersonal textures that surface in the aftermath of loss. Though not drawn from direct memory, the work constructs a version of reality; as Whyte notes, ‘painting can reflect our time, but it doesn’t owe it to the viewer to be a direct reflection of our life.’⁷ 

The fictionality embedded within each painting underscores Whyte’s embrace of artifice, which manifests through an elastic handling of time, space and emotionality. A dreamlike atmosphere arises in Form V: dance with somebody (2025), in which beams of red cascade across figures caught between celebration and conflict, dance and anguish. Enshrouded in veils of light and shadow, the work traces the volatility, tenderness and contradictions that structure the experience of mourning. 

Unfolding as a meditation on mourning and diasporic inheritance, ‘Nine nights; Strange fruit’ positions painting as a portal through which the past may be reconfigured and alternative futures come into view. Marked by formal fragmentation and non-linearity, Whyte’s paintings ‘take the macro of a thing and then explore that across lots of micro-moments’⁸: his intimate snapshots and fractured subjects participate in a continual production of identity as it emerges from rupture, memory and self-representation. They do not demand action but offer recognition: a quiet memorial to a life the artist did not bear witness to but continues to feel.