The well overfloweth its banks and changes course away away from this
island fort towards a new world taking with her gods and dreams and men and
women. We cross the Atlantic in many ways we swim or we sink. This is a piece
about oceans and seas traversed fatally
The Fons Americanus is an allegory of the Black Atlantic and really all global
waters which disastrously connect Africa to America, Europe and economic
prosperity
My name is Kara Walker. I'm an artist. I'm really interested in making work that
explores the power struggles and history and mythologies that inform the way we
perceive ourselves and the way we perceive others
particularly around race or gender. I'm interested in grand themes and small
human frailties, the macro and the micro. Well I first saw the Victoria Memorial at
Buckingham Palace on a lark I mean on on the way to the airport I
saw the monument I took some quick snapshots moving
snapshots out of the window of the taxi and then forgot about it
promptly as one does with monuments and memorials I think that
there's this very peculiar quality that they have of being completely invisible
the larger they are in fact the more they sink into the background. I'm not an
actual historian I'm an unreliable narrator. I sort of let characters or
caricatures sort of emerge sometimes they are culled straight from pop
culture looking at the types of depictions of blackness or of slavery as
they have emerged you know specifically in the 19th century moving through the
20th century and changed somewhat over time. It's this kernel of experience
that can never quite be told in art and I'm always fascinated by these
paradoxes and problems Although slavery didn't exist on these
shores England was a beneficiary of the slave trade and its products and so you
have this kind of institution that spans many hundreds of years and everybody is
implicated in it I wondered how to return the gift of
having come to be through the mechanics of finance, exploitation, murder, rape,
death, ecological destruction, co-optation, coercion, love, seafaring feats, bravery,
slavery, loss, injustice, excess, cruelty, tenacity, submission and progress
conceived in the U.S. to live in this time and place with this opportunity
this ability. So I was working in a different way than I normally work
although there's some common threads. I do tend to do a bit of
writing beforehand just to figure out where my head is. It took a while before
I had a concept but the concept when it came came sort of flooding, very
literally flooding out of me so that it got very large and fluid and funny so I
made these small clay models every day marveling at the characters and
caricatures who emerged. From there we scanned the fingers and forms and worked
with digital imaging, inserting them into a digital mock-up of the Turbine Hall
space and changing and arranging things as needed
It's very strange really to go from like the thumbprint to the digitised version
to sort of back to this machine and then back to our hands again I think
that with this piece I really wanted to make sure that my hand was still present
in it and it wasn't something that was just you know easily machined and
shipped off and moved into the Turbine Hall
The Turbine Hall Commission functions as a one-person version of the
nineteenth-century World's Exposition. The World's Fair was a public
entertainment exploiting the wealth and bounty of rich nations often literally
carried on the backs of its colonised subjects. As a one-woman World's Fair I
have created a space for reflection, joy even, amid the miasma of conflicts racial,
economic and cultural which still lodge themselves in our collective gullet
thanks to the rise of white nationalism, xenophobia, fundamentalist violence and
a poisonous populism which has everyone mouthing off thoughtlessly at
once