Given the choice between Kara Walker’s Atlanta, and hell, one may be tempted to choose the latter. For her latest exhibition at Victoria Miro, the American artist explores her teenage home city of Atlanta, taking a head-on approach to its barbaric past.
Works vary between the large-scale sharp silhouettes that Walker is so known for, and more urgent paintings and charcoal drawings, that call to mind a history of biblical depictions. It is impossible to miss the force of Walker’s creations. Sprawling works might play on the typical aesthetics of fiction, but there is no doubt that these scenes spring from the savage, and really rather recent past of America’s history.
Triptychs reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights recreate Atlanta as hell on earth. Horses foam at the mouth, oppressors sit atop, their soulless eyes staring pointedly for their next target. Men merge into monsters, enlarged phalluses and grabbing hands dominating works, racial and gender divides screaming from these chaotic scenes.
The Atlanta in this body of work is the Atlanta of 1915, specifically, Stone Mountain, then declared the spiritual home of the Ku Klux Klan. A recent history, now largely ignored, this site is currently home to a Wild West theme park. This seems rather apt for Walker, a site of racial violence and oppressive history turned into an amusement park, that in itself chooses to ignore another savage part of history, the displacement and murder of Native Americans.
This is no fictional hell, comforting as that may prove to be.
Kara Walker: Go to Hell or Atlanta, Whichever Comes First is showing at Victoria Miro until 7 November
