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Kara Walker

... calling to me from the angry surface of some grey and threatening sea
09.28.12 - 10.21.12
Video installation — Lieu-Commun, artist run space

Kara Walker
…calling to me from the angry surface of some grey and threatening sea, puppets, shadows puppets, video installation (2007)
Courtesy of the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co

Photo : Nicolas Brasseur, Le Printemps de Septembre 2012

Kara Walker
…calling to me from the angry surface of some grey and threatening sea, shadow puppets, video installation (2007)
Courtesy of the artist and  Sikkema Jenkins & Co
Photo : Nicolas Brasseur, Le Printemps de Septembre 2012

Kara Walker
…calling to me from the angry surface of some grey and threatening sea, puppets, shadows puppets, video installation (2007)
Courtesy of the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co

Kara Walker
…calling to me from the angry surface of some grey and threatening sea, puppets, shadows puppets, video installation (2007)
Courtesy of the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co

Kara Walker
…calling to me from the angry surface of some grey and threatening sea, puppets, shadows puppets, video installation (2007)
Courtesy of the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co

Born 1969 in Stockton (USA), she lives and works in New York.  


An African-American Californian, the artist sometimes says that she "became black" during a trip to Georgia, in that region of old America that was once a slave country, where all the fantasies, myths and clichés of "black" exoticism still seem to infuse. She asks herself: "Who am I beyond this skin I live in? "

 

In Toulouse, Kara Walker presents ... calling to me from the angry surface of some grey and threatening sea, a video-installation projected in transparency on a screen surrounded by tall silhouettes of painted wooden trees. Set in a cemetery, the action describes the burial of a black woman before her 'resurrection' and mating with a white slave master. A moment of forced love is soon interrupted by a young one-legged slave who assaults and then kills the lovers, before mating with the dead woman in turn. "There is an absurdity, an excess in what I do, a huge gap between the sources and my fantasy reconstructions", says Kara Walker, who still affirms: "As long as there is a Darfur, as long as someone says 'You're not from here', it seems relevant to continue exploring the terrain of racism. "A terrain that cannot be ignored, and which Kara Walker appropriates with force.

 

Kara Walker is a graduate of Atlanta Art University (BFA, 1991) and the Rhode Island School of Design (MFA, 1994). Her work has been exhibited at SFMoMA in San Francisco, the Guggenheim, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and MoMA in New York. In 1998, Kara Walker received the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Award. MacArthur Foundation Award. In 2002, she represented the United States at the São Paulo Biennial. The Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris devoted a major solo exhibition to her in 2007.