Kara Walker

Coversation with the artist

Works and biography

Drawing her inspiration from sources as varied as the antebellum South, testimonial slave narratives, historical novels, and minstrel shows, Walker has invented a repertoire of powerful narratives in which she conflates fact and fiction to uncover the living roots of racial and gender bias…

In her works Kara Walker focuses on questions of identity, racism and social injustice. Her historical figures, at first sight apparently harmless, mostly black silhouettes, subtly yet brutally combine episodes from the history of the South with images from Walker’s own imagination: "The silhouette was a near perfect solution to a complex project that I set for myself… to try and uncover the often subtle and uncomfortable ways racism, and racist and sexist stereotypes influence and script our everyday lives."

In her work, Walker unleashes the traditionally proper, Victorian medium of silhouette directly onto the walls of the gallery, creating a theatrical space in which her unruly cut-paper characters cavort seemingly with one foot in the historical reality of slavery, and the other in a fantastical, nightmarish space that suggests the world of romantic novels…