![\"Kara](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/KW_VMG_2015-e.jpg\")
Kara Walker, Go to Hell or Atlanta, Whichever Comes First, Installation. Courtesy the Artist and Victoria Miro, London<\/p>\n Kara Walker, Go to Hell or Atlanta, Whichever Comes First, Installation. Courtesy the Artist and Victoria Miro, London<\/p>\n
The root of this exhibition is a large black and white photograph that covers one of the walls in the upper gallery. With its very long title, \u201cThe Stone Mountain Dr Martin Luther King referred to in his famous \u2018I Have a Dream\u2019 speech of 1963 (with monument to the Confederacy completed in 1972)\u201d, this image, produced in collaboration with photographer and filmmaker Ari Marcopoulos, reflects how the mountain metaphorically and physically shadowed Walker\u2019s teenage years in Atlanta. Through the cut out medium, Walker appropriates the thoroughly bourgeois and decorative style of the silhouette, with its origins in bodily absence and sentimental memory. She interrogates racial stereotypes, derived from the antebellum south, which still haunt contemporary consciousness. The silhouettes are cinematic, sweeping across the wall. Walker oscillates between criticising perceptions of both gender and race. Figures engage in sexualised and violent acts. The vitality and explicitness of these images reanimate stereotypes, creating hyperbolic performances of scripted identity. Walker\u2019s radical mythology forces one to consider how these stereotypes are constructed and maintained. Her iconography has parallels with \u201cblackface\u201d and minstrelsy<\/a> \u2013 a masquerade that perpetuated ready-made images of blackness for the white consumer\u2019s eyes, which were then maintained throughout society without any inquiries about authenticity.<\/p>\n In the lower space, Walker addresses other specific forms of representation that have cultural associations with \u201clow\u201d art. \u201cFour Idioms of Negro Art #1 Folk\u201d, \u201cFour Idioms of Negro Art #2 Graffiti\u201d, and \u201cFour Idioms of Negro Art #4 Primitivism\u201d are positioned in dialogue with each other on three facing walls. <\/em>Walker simultaneously reclaims and satirises the motifs and styles of each idiom. Appropriated and subjugated, the metaphorical characters depicted are frozen in abstract identity. Walker forces the viewer to consider the political and psychological consequences that accompany identity formation in contexts of oppression and violence.<\/p>\n Exhibited alongside are a series of twelve preliminary drawings entitled \u201cTell Me Your Thoughts on Police Brutality Miss \u2018Spank me Harder\u2019\u201d. <\/em>These sketches, particularly \u201cUnarmed Black Man\u201d or \u201cPull my Hair\u201d (which is significantly evocative of the images of the young girl in Texas accosted by a police officer at a swimming pool earlier this year), catapult us into the present day. These fraught, yet powerful and witty, narratives prompt us to consider what needs to be confronted before we can overcome the grey shadows of Stone Mountain. Kara Walker, Go to Hell or Atlanta, Whichever Comes First, Installation. Courtesy the Artist and Victoria Miro, London The root of this exhibition is a large black and white photograph that covers one of the walls in the upper gallery. With its very long title, \u201cThe Stone Mountain Dr Martin Luther King referred to in…<\/p>","protected":false},"author":31,"featured_media":25504,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[11856,139],"tags":[3417,38,3418,482,3419,141,3420],"class_list":["post-25449","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sleek-art","category-art","tag-ari-marcopoulos","tag-art","tag-atlanta","tag-frieze","tag-kara-walker","tag-london","tag-philomena-epps"],"acf":{"main_category":null,"legacy":"1","exclude_from_ads":null,"hero_title":null,"subtitle":null,"hero":null,"teasers":null,"facebook_image":null,"related_articles":null,"next_article":null,"sleek_card_focus":null,"content":null},"yoast_head":"\n
\nWalker has cited the shooting of nine African American churchgoers in South Carolina this June as a trigger to re-think about Stone Mountain; a mountain declared the spiritual birthplace of the Klu Klux Klan in 1915, and where a bas-relief of Confederate generals was carved upon. The magnitude of Walker\u2019s photograph has parallels with the tradition of the great American landscape. However, the evocative grey scale of the image undercuts this lofty panoramic quality. Grey is a colour of doubt, and the implication of trauma within Atlanta casts this site as an undeniably grey area. Walker installed \u201cThe Jubilant Martyrs of Obsolescence and Ruin\u201d,<\/em> comprised of cut paper shapes, in dialogue with this image. As with other installations of this type, she made this work on site, cutting in stream of consciousness mode.<\/p>\n![\"Kara](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/KW_VMG_2015-f.jpg\")
Kara Walker, The Jubilant Martyrs of Obsolescence and Ruin, 2015. Courtesy the Artist and Victoria Miro, London<\/p>\n![\"Kara](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/KW79_40-Acres-of-Mules_2015_framed.jpg\")
Kara Walker, 40 Acres of Mules, 2015. Courtesy the Artist, Sikkema Jenkins & Co. New York and Victoria Miro, London<\/p>\n![\"Kara](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/KW64_Four-Idioms-on-Negro-Art-no-2-Graffiti_2015_framed.jpg\")
Kara Walker,
Four Idioms on Negro Art #2 Graffiti, 2015.
Courtesy the Artist, Sikkema Jenkins & Co. New York and Victoria Miro, London<\/p>\n![\"Kara](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/KW65_Four-Idioms-on-Negro-Art-no-4-Primitivism_2015_framed.jpg\")
Kara Walker, Four Idioms on Negro Art #4 Primitivism, 2015. Courtesy the Artist, Sikkema Jenkins & Co. New York and Victoria Miro, London<\/p>\n![\"Kara](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/KW66_Negress-Notes-4_2015-UNTITLED-5-copy.jpg\")
Kara Walker, Negress Notes (from series), 2015. Courtesy the Artist, Sikkema Jenkins & Co. New York and Victoria Miro, London<\/p>\n
\nKara Walker, “Go to Hell or Atlanta, Whichever Comes First” runs until 7 November at Victoria Miro<\/a> <\/strong> \nText von Philomena Epps,<\/strong><\/a> a freelance writer and researcher based in London, UK. She is the founder and editor of the cultural platform, Orlando<\/a>. Alongside her writing, she works full time as a project assistant for the “Performance at Tate” research project, and at Third Text journal.
\nMehr: Strahlende Visionen: Ai Weiwei in der K\u00f6niglichen Akademie<\/a><\/strong> \nMehr: Agnieszka Brzezanska: Art As Vibration<\/a><\/strong><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"