‘Kara Walker. Burning Village’ explores the artist’s entire career, which addresses issues of slavery, racism, and gender using black silhouettes. The Institut Valencià d’Art Modern (IVAM) is dyed black and white with a double exhibition: ‘Kara Walker. Burning Village’, produced by the Museum of Contemporary Art of Alicante (MACA) and the group exhibition ‘Habitar las sombras’. Both exhibitions intertwine the IVAM and MACA collections to address what remains in the shadows, with black and white as the protagonist.

During the presentation, the regional secretary of culture, Pilar Tébar, highlighted the “necessary collaboration” between two representative cultural institutions in the Valencian Community and, as a connecting link, “the extraordinary and generous donation of the Michael Jenkins and Javier Romero collection to MACA.”

For her part, IVAM director Blanca de la Torre explained that the exhibition “Kara Walker. Burning Village,” which opened on September 25 at the Julio González Centre (IVAM), “brings together 44 pieces spanning her entire career and constitutes one of the most comprehensive collections of the artist’s work on display in European institutions.”

The artist is known for her paper silhouette work inspired by the historical tradition of Victorian shadow portraits, shadow theatre, and magic lanterns. This exhibition at the IVAM showcases drawings, prints, sculptures, artist’s books, and one of her most recent videos. “This exhibition serves as a starting point for the ‘Inhabiting Shadows’ exhibition, so that both proposals engage in dialogue with each other, also generating a profound dialogue between the collections of both museums,” emphasized the IVAM director.

De la Torre also noted that these two exhibitions “are extending to the IVAMLab with the ‘El rincón de luz’ project, a new free-play proposal based on the pedagogy of light aimed at early childhood.”

For her part, MACA’s curator and head of collections, Rosa Castells, emphasized that Kara Walker is “one of the most uncomfortable, courageous, and necessary artists of our time. Her work is a visual bombshell, a distorted mirror reflecting the mechanisms of pressure, social injustice, structural racism, and the perpetuation of narratives.” 

‘Inhabiting the Shadows’

The exhibition by the African-American artist serves as a starting point for ‘Inhabiting the Shadows’, curated by Blanca de la Torre and Rosa Castells, which has black and white as the sole protagonist in the more than one hundred works by artists from the IVAM and MACA collections, among which are names such as Louise Bourgeois, Joan Fontcuberta, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Thomas Struth, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Cristina Iglesias, Berta Cáccamo, Thomas Ruff, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Rula Halawani, Chema Madoz, Eulàlia Valldosera, Anthony Caro, Cristina García Rodero and Cindy Sherman, among others.

The exhibition is structured in five rooms and is designed as a space with clear allusions to cinema and the atmosphere of film noir. Furthermore, literature and poetry permeate the exhibition like a meta-narrative that accompanies each area. “On the exhibition walls, visitors can read verses by Alejandra Pizarnik or quotes from Concha Méndez, Toni Morrison, and the Valencian María Beneyto,” noted the IVAM director.

John Davies’s family of ghosts and Zoran Music’s faded figures, reminiscent of his time in the Dachau concentration camp, greet visitors in a first room that evokes specters and presences. The next space explores the inner shadows and complexities of the psyche.

The exhibition continues with the shadows of the domestic, an ironic distance between the sublime and the familiar, with works such as Cindy Sherman’s portrayal of a housewife in a film noir reenactment; an installation of white towels on Natividad Navalón’s lead shelving; and an alabaster cradle by Alex Francés.

The section dedicated to human traces includes works by artists such as Mark Bradford, Joan Fontcuberta, Cristina Iglesias, Ángeles Marco, and Roberta González. Absent architecture populates the final room with industrial archaeologies photographed by Bernd and Hilla Becher, classical architecture by Thomas Struth, skyscrapers by Jorge Ribalta, ancient and modern buildings by Hiroshi Sugimoto and Gabriele Basilico, and interior recesses painted by José Manuel Ballester.

Report by Will McCarthy

Article copyright ‘24/7 Valencia’

‘Kara Walker. Burning Village’ photo copyright Miguel Lorenzo

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