"Few have managed to capture the collision between past and present, between histories and horror stories, between sexuality and shame, between skin and meat, as powerfully and provocatively as Kara Walker."
-Barbara Kruger about Kara Walker
Kara Waker is one of the most controversial artists of the 21st century. She was selected by “Time” magazine as one of the top hundred artists and entertainers that “shaped the world”.
Kara Walker is known for her cutout, iconic, life-size black silhouettes and for her sexually explicit, violent, charged with racial and gender stereotypes artwork. (pic 1-2)
Although, she is best recognized for her black silhouettes on the large scale, she works in other media like: quash, ink, watercolor, film, or projecting coloured light on the walls. The latter creates a theatrical space and implicates the viewers by casting their shadows on her artwork. (pic 3-7)
Walker has chosen the medium of cut-out silhouettes on a large scale for a number of reasons. She claims that she was always interested in making monumental “history paintings’ (pic 8-10)—she wanted to create a stage where she would be able to position and manipulate her figures and subjects and then to capture the glory and drama by freezing the moment of the play. Silhouetting techniques , a traditionally Victorian craft popular in the 19th -century among middle –class women, intrigued Walker as a simple but complex at the same time type of expression. Delicate and feminine, silhouettes simplify shapes into easily recognized forms. The identity of the figures can be only recognized by their actions or their profile.
Kara Walker, as a female black artist feels the need to represent the world from her point of view; (pic11-15) exploring the racial and gender issues from the past-- there is no clear moral position, nor clear narrative story. Her art is full of contradictions, providing many questions but not many answers. She is exploring the impact of slavery on the presence and vulgarity that was applied to the black female body in the past. Walker is projecting fiction into the past—the past events, some factual, some exaggerated or imaginary; she is mixing history with fantasy and imagination.
Her figures are involved in a power struggle, domination and submission. Walker’s artwork was and still is the subject of controversy: her art was rejected by elder African-American artists as “portraying negative racial stereotypes rather than attacking them,” others were disturbed by the fact that she is mixing violence and brutality with sexuality and humour.
Walker is provoking and disturbing our sensibilities… and then she is leaving us with mixed feelings and full of open-ended questions. After all, her art is all about the unexpected.
“My works are erotically explicit, shameless. I would be happy if visitors would stand in front of my work and feel a bit ashamed—ashamed because they have…simply believed in the project of modernism.” –Kara Walker