Kara Walker in Basel: 600 shades of inequality

(MENAFN- Swissinfo) A Black Hole is Everything a Star Wants to BeExternal link is the first time the artist has revealed her personal drawing archive in an exhibition of more than 600 works, pieces that illustrate painful truths about the concrete and psychological effects of inequality. 

Best known for installations made from silhouettes cut in black paper that conjure grotesque and marvellous imagery of African Americans and their slave masters, for decades Walker has unstintingly faced the ongoing legacy of her country's years of slavery.

swissinfo.ch talked to the exhibition's curator, Anita Haldemann, on how the Basel Art Museum (Kunstmuseum Basel) has been tackling the issues of diversity and representation.

SWI swissinfo.ch: This year the Kunstmuseum Basel is leading the way with female artists on a par with their male counterparts. Is this going to continue in the coming years?

Anita Haldemann: Yes, absolutely. It's been a strategy for a while that we have intensified in the last five years. We have a strong focus on women not only in exhibitions, but in the collection as well. That's even more important long-term.

Traditional museums face immense challenges to re-examine their collections in relation to their gender imbalance. Has the Kunstmuseum Basel's acquisition policy evolved in recent years?

It definitely has. Especially in contemporary art, where it's easier; there's no excuse not to find good women artists. We've made it possible to buy works by Kara Walker, but we're also trying to look back and to include more women in some areas at least. We have started to acquire Sari Dienes, or Shirley Jaffe who has been rediscovered and is to have an important retrospective exhibition soon. For some artists, like Lee Krasner or Helen Frankenthaler, it's really difficult – the prices are so high it's hard to collect backwards. But there are still interesting positions that we try to focus on.

Are there quotas in the acquisition policy?

There are no specific quotas being defined since there are other criteria in addition to gender, such as diversity in a geographical or cultural sense. We want to engage deeply with this perspective, and that process will have a more lasting effect than simply following numbers. 

The Kara Walker exhibition is intensely personal. How did you convince Walker to reveal so much of her previously unseen drawing archive?

It was a conversation we had when she came here. It was important that she got to know our collection and the tradition we have as such an old museum, especially in the Kupferstichkabinett – we concentrate on keeping even the smallest piece of paper. It's a cultural archive. This made her think of her own archive. 

We offered her a platform for her art in a serious way and that encouraged her to open up. I didn't ask, because I didn't know she had it! I think it's because of the tradition in Basel; my predecessors organised big exhibitions with artists like Beuys or Rosemarie Trockel, where we showed 300 or 400 pieces, to really give an insight into the mind of an artist and how he or she develops their ideas. 

Kara Walker was going to turn 50 soon when we started talking, a moment for her to look back on her life. At this point she had started to work on the fountain [Fons Americanus, 2019] for Tate Modern, and there's a creative part but there's also a lot of organisation and finances, to make that possible; after visiting Basel she just started to go back to intensely doing drawings again, working on a small-scale, intimate format to counter-balance that.

Why is this exhibition taking place now: given Walker's personal reasons or it being timely for the Kunstmuseum?

I think the fact that she opened up her archive had to do with this place. I was interested in her work 10 years ago, but then we didn't have the new building and the infrastructure for her art. And the timing is right. Now she's part of a development in our exhibitions, we've shown Sam Gilliam and Theaster Gates (LINK TO INTERVIEW WE MADE IN 2018), we have started to go into a more diverse kind of American art, not just the white guys.

In your catalogue essay you write that 'drawing has been used particularly intensively by artists who are concerned with questions of identity and power relations'. Why is that?

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  The right side, 2018 Kunstmuseum Basel, Kupferstichkabinett, © Kara Walker
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  Untitled, 16 (left) and A Shocking Declaration of Independence, 2018 © Private Archive Kara Walker/Kunstmuseum Basel, Kupferstichkabinett
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  The Gross Clinical Presents: Pater Gravidam Kunstmuseum Basel, Kupferstichkabinett, © Kara Walker
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  Untitled, 2011 Collection of Randi Charno Levine, New York, © Kara Walker
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  Untitled, form a 24-part series, 2002-2004 Archive of the artist © Kara Walker
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  Untitled, 1999 (left) and Barack Obama as Othello "The Moor" with the severed head of Iago in a new and revised ending by Kara E. Walker, 2019 Private Archive Kara Walker and The Joyner/Giuffrida Collection, San Francisco
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  Ausstellungsansicht Kunstmuseum Basel, Kara Walker, A Black Hole is Everything a Star Longs to Be. Kunstmuseum Basel/Jonas Hänggi
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  ' merica, 2016 Kunstmuseum Basel, Kupferstichkabinett © Kara Walker
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  Untitled, 2016 Private archive Kara Walker © Kara Walker
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  Fealty as Faint (a drawing exercise), 2019 Fredriksen Family Collection, Oslo © Kara Walker
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  Untitled, before 2007 Collection of Lonti Evers, New York © Kara Walker
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  Ausstellungsansicht Kunstmuseum Basel, Kara Walker, A Black Hole is Everything a Star Longs to Be. Kunstmuseum Basel/Julian Salinas
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  Yesterdayness in America Today, 2020 Private Archive Kara Walker © Kara Walker

Because it's the medium where you can develop ideas or try out ideas. In a drawing you can do anything, just try it and bury it or develop it. So usually a drawing is part of a sequence or rather a process, where you see the artist thinking and you see ideas coming to life. That's what Kara said herself, that each piece of paper is a site of reflection.

Kara Walker exercises critique of the presentation of Black artists and expectations of how they should behave in a museum context. In one drawing, for example, she writes 'Tate liverpool [sic] is pleased to announce 10 ways to annoy a negress'. What she calls the 'white art world' is part of the artist's investigation. How have you been challenged realising this exhibition?

We really wanted her to feel comfortable in how she was presented since she doesn't like to be exposed. We tried to give her space in which she could work, in privacy. Like with all artists, we showed her all the texts and the selection of images [used to mediate the exhibition]. But we had interesting discussions such as on the use of Black vs. African American. She felt she was being taken seriously and that we cared about how we dealt with her art.

There's a danger that Swiss audiences come to Kara Walker's exhibition with a feeling of disassociation. But several works in the show include German media clippings, or there's a drawing of an emaciated girl with the text 'wenigger and wenniger' [wordplay with 'weniger', German for 'less', and 'nigger'] which is very powerful when you're not expecting to find that German resonance. Did you discuss the Basel context with Walker?

We did, because I was afraid also that people would think 'Oh that's an American topic, that's interesting but it does not concern us'. I was really glad to see those German pieces in her archive. I think it was interesting for her to come back to a German context but not in Germany. She has also said she doubts that everyone will engage with the topic and how it relates to them deeply, but during the last year Black Lives Matter and recent events such as the commemoration of the story of Tulsa were very present in the media, and the Swiss audience is more up to date than before the pandemic. It's not just about slavery and history but about today and how we deal with a one-sided history.

But at the same time, we didn't want it to be a totally didactic exhibition. We could have displayed the history of the US, the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement, and to do that you'd have to explain so much. We've tried to focus on giving tours and workshops so anyone who wants to know can get the information.

A recent WOZ newspaper review criticised the exhibition framing and mediation, how the construction of race, for example, was not discussed. Where did you start the work of mediation?

We worked, for instance, with students from the ZHdK [Zurich University of the Arts] in the area of mediation and they lead special tours and workshops dealing with this issue. But it's a challenge; I'm sure not all Swiss people are familiar with American history. Kara Walker herself says you don't always need to really study in detail before understanding a drawing. Sometimes it's so much more direct and basic. But maybe we could have done more.

Kara Walker's work generally shows an individual's standpoint. The tension between the individual and larger structures is compelling. What role can a museum play in addressing questions such as racism or inequality?

We bring it up in our exhibitions, but this really started a process of reflection. Last year, before the opening was initially scheduled, we had an anti-racism workshop for the museum team. It was important to start the discussion within the museum. We are also participating in a programme from the Kanton Basel-Stadt with the Literaturhaus and other institutions, in which we discuss diversifying our activities inside and outside.

Diversifying is not just about racism, we have tried to include other perspectives, e.g. I showed artists like Leiko Ikemura who's a Japanese-Swiss artist or Rozà El-Hassan, a Hungarian-Syrian artist who has both a Muslim and Christian background. We try to diversify in different areas; we have a whole department, a curator [Daniel Kurjakovic] of programming and education, with activities that go in several different directions.

President Obama figures particularly prominently in Walker's show. I wondered if a Swiss politician could be so visible in an exhibition in Basel, or does physical distance allow you more room for manoeuvre?

They [The Obama works] were shown in New York, though during the lockdown. It wasn't even a problem there, for some reason. Maybe because they are drawings! You have Othello, as Obama with Trump's head in his lap. A comedian [Kathy Griffin] had herself photographed with a plastic severed Trump head covered in blood and she lost her job with a TV station because it was too explicit.

But here, with drawing, we're in the realm of art and fiction, re-writing Shakespeare's Othello, not showing what you want to do. There are several layers of distance from reality. But it's hard to say.

One is struck by Walker's ongoing frustration, though she has said that 'drawing is a dance of scepticism and faith'. Have you faith in the power of art to bring about change?

I don't know how much change is possible, but I also believe we can cause thought and reconsideration of one's position in life. I am sceptical but optimistic enough to keep doing this work.

Articles in this story

• Kara Walker - A black hole is everything a star longs to be ORIG

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