Kara Walker: A Black Hole is Everything a Star Longs to Be

Abstract

Following exhibits in Basel and Frankfurt, Kara Walker’s show A Black Hole is Everything a Star Longs to Be: Drawings 1992–2020 is on display in the De Pont Museum for Contemporary Art in Tilburg, The Netherlands. New works on paper alongside a selection from Walker’s private archives compose a treasure trove of well over 600 drawings, experimental writings, personal notes, dream narratives, sheets of textual and visual play, found objects, and scrolls. Incontrovertibly finished pieces appear side by side with try-outs, gestures, studies, and sketches. Occupying the halls of a former textile factory, they proclaim the ongoing process of making, a lot more making, and then trajectories of other kinds of making: new forms, new directions. The viewer soaks up the existential inquisitiveness permeating the artist’s encounter with language and the world: with concrete political developments and incidents in the news but also with the colonialist tools, identity constructions, and racial and gender elisions honed by centuries of Western art. A spirit of playful investigation and rambunctious humour hails from many works. Lightness is seldom absent. It is an aspect of the works’ depth of curiosity. Gravity and levity fuel each other in engagement with ferociously difficult subjects, carried by form and language (Figure 1). A compellingly anti-heroic notion of cultural agency emerges from this subjective richness, which veils neither pleasure nor racial and sexual atrocity. One expects this affective intensification and conceptual rigour from Walker, but it is a stunning accomplishment when it flows forth from a massive turn to the artist’s archive.