"The redneck who walked into the coffee shop where I once worked and when asked how he wanted his coffee said: I like my coffee like I like my women: hot, black ´n´ sweet."

Kara Walker from "Slice of Hand: Silhouette Art of Kara Walker" by Sydney Jenkins.


installationview Kara Walker: African´t

In "African´t" by Kara Walker we are surrounded by black silhouettes that like a landscape cover all the walls of the room. At first sight everything seems in order and quite harmless, but at a closer look we see both indecent and cruel occurrences taking place. Small simple clues such as crinolines, long curls, flowing fields of corn, Uncle Tom-like figures and half-naked black women, transport us to the American South and the past. To the Civil War and slavery.

Kara Walker, who is herself black, here investigates the stereotypical image of blacks, or "African-Americans" by the correct name. Under Walker,s direction, the silhouettes build up a cruel comedy with associations to "Gone with the Wind", The Brothers Grimm, Hollywood produced black stereotypes and racial-biological studies.

In the latest number of the internet magazine Art-Orbit (www.artnode.se/artorbit) Kara Walker is interviewed by the curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist. Asked about from where she receives inspiration, Kara Walker replies that one of the things was a T-shirt, popular ten years ago, which had the slogan: "It,s a Black thing, You wouldn´t understand", Walker says that "It inspired a whole way of thinking for me. Because, obviously the "you" in the saying is Not Black...So what does this mean to the person who is black and still doesn´t quite understand? This conjured up a bunch of typical associations with blackness - the Black as a mystery, something altogether Other".

Naturally, or unfortunately, there are unlimited sources of inspirations for an artist whose subject matter is racism, from small everyday observations to "speculating on why a Black model was used to signal the re-emergence of White as the new fall color".

Kara Walker was born in 1969 in Stockton, California and educated at the Rhode Island School of Design. She has had solo exhibitions at Wooster Gardens/Brent Sikkema New York and at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others, and participated in many group exhibitions, including the Whitney Biennale (1997) and in "La Belle et La Belle" (1995) at the Musee d´Art Moderne in Paris.

Karina Ericsson Wärn

Director

Index The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation

In connection to Kara Walker´s exhibition, we would like to especially thank Eileen and Peter Norton, Santa Monica, in whose collection "African´t" is included and Brent Sikkema, New York.