Kara Walker

The late theorist Stuart Hall famously unfolded the perverse dynamic between British pleasure and Black subjection in his 1991 essay ‘Old and New Identities’: ‘I am the sweet tooth, the sugar plantations that rotted generations of English children’s teeth [...] That is the outside history that is inside the history of the English.’ Bringing the outside history inside has been the project of numerous Black British artists whose work subverts Empire’s monuments and heraldry, including Hew Locke and Yinka Shonibare. Following in that tradition without explicitly naming it, Walker inverts the Victoria Memorial – a marble and gilt monument to Queen Victoria in front of London’s Buckingham Palace – to populate Hall’s ‘other history’ with figures that look hand-worked and urgently rendered.

The spouting Black breast recurs throughout Walker’s work. In the 1998 installation Camptown Ladies, a cartoonishly large drop of milk springs from the breast of a Hottentot Venus figure while her baby excretes into a white woman’s mouth. The lactating Venus in Fons Americanus also speaks to gendered histories of extraction: enslaved women forced to wet-nurse white children and deprive their own of milk; high infant mortality rates on West Indian sugar plantations that left lactating mothers childless; and Britain rewriting its laws of descent to exploit enslaved women’s reproduction and convert their babies into slave-owner profits. Closer to the Turbine Hall’s West entryway, a child’s crying face breaks the surface of the water inside a scalloped shell, echoing the shell surrounding Venus. Too far from the child to breastfeed, Venus lactates on a loop, her blood and milk feeding the fountain’s closed circuit instead.

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