Such an exhibition format does not come across every day. The fifty-one-year-old African-American artist Kara Walker started at the Schirn in Frankfurt with her entire archive - 650 works, including paintings, pastels and her cryptic silhouettes that made her famous, a lot of works on paper, but also films that she made especially for produced the show. The eloquently ambiguous exhibition title "A Black Hole Is Everything a Star Longs to Be" oscillates between poetry and chaos, between pride and abyss: on the one hand, the self-confidence of the title claim that the most ardent wish of a star is its transformation into a black hole, on the other hand, teems with it in the show only in front of those on a physical level, for example the body orifices of slaves,who have been maltreated in every conceivable way in the past or whose mouths are gagged and suffocated in the present, as in the case of George Floyds.
Stefan Trinks
Editor in the features section.
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It is a confusing, initially overwhelming all-over on the walls, often arranged by the artist herself in a St. Petersburg hanging. Overtaxing also because apart from the drastic laconically portrayed cruelty and sexual debauchery, no common thread can be found for a long time. With one exception: the only themed room is dedicated to the former US President Obama. Here you can find the brilliantly drawn “Barack Obama Tormented Saint Anthony Putting Up With the Whole, Birther 'Conspiracy” from 2019, which Martin Schongauer's timeless demons from the fifteenth century revolve around the visibly suffering “saint” Obama, not without one of them Awarding features and hairstyle to Donald Trump for his infamous birthright defamation campaign.Or his monumentally representative “actor” portrait with the Shakespeare-like title “Barack Obama as Othello, The Moor 'With the Severed Head of Iago in a New and Revised Ending by Kara E. Walker”. Obama sits on a rock, leg by leg, his left shoe with a golden buckle theatrically pedestal on a raised rock while his gaze stares uncertainly into the darkness around him from eyes that are as iridescent as his shirt. In his lap, however, like Hamlet at one time, he holds the skull, the severed and battered head of Trump, which he also drills his left thumb deep into the eye socket.Leg by leg, his left shoe with a golden buckle theatrically pedestal on a raised rock, while his gaze from eyes that are just as iridescent as his shirt stares uncertainly into the darkness around him. In his lap, however, like Hamlet at one time, he holds the skull, the severed and battered head of Trump, which he also drills his left thumb deep into the eye socket.Leg by leg, his left shoe with a golden buckle theatrically pedestal on a raised rock, while his gaze from eyes that are just as iridescent as his shirt stares uncertainly into the darkness around him. In his lap, however, like Hamlet at one time, he holds the skull, the severed and battered head of Trump, which he also drills his left thumb deep into the eye socket.
As a reference to classical history painting, his crimson red sash leads a life of its own, mocking the laws of nature, as a moving accessory and stumbles towards a mighty rock behind him; the shirt sleeves, indicated only in bright white Conté chalk on the dark brown background, flicker like wildly in front of the eye. Just as Walker here merges the two great doubters of Shakespeare in one picture, she also inextricably links the fates of two successive presidents by inventing a completely new ending to the story - as already announced in the baroque title of the picture. Walker claims for himself what has been taken for granted over the centuries by, in the vast majority of cases, non-black "historians" - a revision of history from the victor's perspective.The Moor has also done his duty with her, but he does not leave without his successor's trophy.
Walker's Obama pursues abysmal “blackfacing” insofar as the Nobel Peace Prize laureate usurps the role of the violent Moor of Venice with her - instead of Trump's severed head, Osama bin Laden's head could also rest in his lap.
Opposite the Othello-Iago smear tragedy with reversed roles, Walker hangs a purely stereotype image: Obama is enthroned, disguised as a Zulu, with a phallic spear on a hunted pig.
Those who do not have to swallow in the face of such stereotypes can only share the allegations of Obama's uncivilized African origins from the Trump camp.