Kara Walker is an American painter, silhouettist, printmaker, installation artist and filmmaker. As one of America’s most acclaimed contemporary artists, her work has been widely exhibited at institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art (both in New York), the MCA (Chicago), and most recently the Tate Modern in London. In June 2021, her upcoming solo exhibition A Black Hole is Everything a Star Longs to Be will show more than 600 of her drawings at the Kunstmuseum, Basel and then travel to the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt and the De Pont Museum of Contemporary Art in Tilburg, the Netherlands.

Walker’s practice revolves around social and politically charged topics such as race, gender, sexuality, violence and identity. While she first caught the attention of the public with her black cut-paper silhouette figures depicting slavery scenes from the Antebellum South, in the past years her practice has turned from the enigmatic shadows that have pretty much become her trademark towards monumental public art installations.

The most remarkable of these installations is a 23 meter high Black sphinx-like naked figure covered in sugar with the self-explanatory title A Subtlety, Or… the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant (2014). When this piece – commissioned by Creative Time, was shown in the former Domino Sugar Factory in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the New Yorker critic Hilton Als described it as being an installation coming from the artist’s knowledge that ‘ghosts can hurt you because history does not go away’. However, what Als refers to in relation to this piece captures the essence of Walker’s work in general – it is through constant engagement with the past’s shadows that the artist constructs a historical narrative that cannot but communicate with the present. As the artist has pointed out in interview:

The Portfolio in this issue of Electra presents a selection of ink, graphite and watercolour drawings, collages and paper cuttings from the series Untitled (2002-2004), which, until very recently, had been part of the artist’s personal archive and thus unavailable to the public. The images – in a matt palette of black, bronze and light blue – stand in juxtaposition with scribbled notes, suggesting a sense of intimacy combined with a strong subjectivity. Throughout the series, Walker’s voice is very much present: sometimes underlining, and at other times distorting, what we first think we see. In fact, contradiction can be said to be one of her most valued tools. In the selection of images shown here for instance, the light-handed lines of the drawings and soft strokes of the watercolours stand in total opposition to the harshness of the minimalistic and at times caricatured scenes of oppression, sex and murder, reinforcing their violence.

Despite the sense of immediacy and spontaneity that the drawings transmit, the different scenarios we witness appear suspended. Regardless of the scene’s settings, whether inferred as a natural or domestic environment, there is a timeless and space--less feel to them which leads to a tension characteristic of an unsolved mystery. Why are bodies dismembered? And to whom do the isolated hand and sexual organs belong? The depicted situations transmit a conspiratorial, institutionalized secrecy that hides the identities of both the oppressor and the victim – a two-sided anonymity which conceals the oppressor’s guilt and ignores the victim’s shame.

Even though not all the images expose direct violence, as a series they convey a restlessness that stems from the unpredictability of uncontrolled authority. The consequence is a daunting fear that lurks everywhere. So much so that the festive banner to celebrate the birth of a new life is depicted in the same foreboding colour as the strangling slings that could lead to its end. Becoming a lens through which the entirety of the world is met, this state of unrelenting apprehension swathes even innocent landscapes, as in the ‘sentimental scene from the Mississippi Chattahoochee of my youth’. In the face of a violent reality, everything tends to become tainted with an obscure meaning.

As such, Walker’s drawings speak of our incapability to keep the past in its place; of our hopelessness in trying to prevent history’s ghosts from permeating our present corporeality. In between dreams, nightmares and moments of lucidity, we lead a haunted existence.