Visual art
Experiencing Kara Walker
Still from 8 Possible Beginnings or: The Creation of an African-America, Parts 1-8I have only been familiar with the work of Kara Walker in terms of her images that I have seen. But was introduced to her moving image work by the curator Teka Selman in a talk she gave in Barbados where I was also presenting my work.
Kara Walker developed a reputation for controversy I guess because of the use of sexual and racial stereotypes.
The work that really moved me was 8 Possible Beginnings or: The Creation of an African-America, Parts 1-8. I found it strangely poignant and erotic at the same time. The use of animation shadow puppets also made you imagine more, than what was in the space and the frame. Your imagination filled in the blanks. Maybe some people are disturbed by the way the images force them to confront their imaginings and they do not like what their internal eye sees. But then they should think this is how America was created too.
We are so used to the Hollywood version of slavery, the noble African, the nurturing mammie, the sexy Mandingo, that we forget the complexities of the relationships in slavery. The intertwinedness about master and slave, the brutality, the dependency, the domination and submission and how that corrupted us all.
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2 comments for “Experiencing Kara Walker”
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I agree that Kara Walker’s versatile cut-outs foreground the imagination. There’s a quiet repetition to her reinvented 18th century silhouettes, oddly for such energetic figures, that creates a minimalist rhythm and allows space for thoughts and feelings. Seeing them in Tate Britain, the huge impact on me was of all of her figures being black. The logic of the cut-out means that her white slave-owners are created from the same black paper as the slaves. Her device allowed me to experience viscerally how intertwined are the lives of black and white people in these stories of eroticised suffering. For me, this felt truth of white people at the heart of narratives of slavery points to how strongly the polarities of power around slavery and the racial identities we have created in response to it are a legacy for white people.
It is interesting that people forget how intertwined sexually, socially, familialy slavery was for black and white people. And we can never seem to look it in the eye.
To look at Blackness one must also look at whiteness, because they were both created through colonisation and slavery.