Kara Walker

Crouching on a theater stage in front of a shadowy audience, a black woman in 19th-century dress devours a little white girl. This shocking scene can be seen as a reversal of the appropriation of black bodies by white oppressors in spectacles such as blackface minstrelsy. At the same time, Walker has described cannibalism as a sensual mixture of love and hate, pointing to interpretations of it as a symbol of the complex psychological interconnections between the exploiter and the exploited. Violent and ambiguous, the print echoes the darkest images by Goya, which Walker studied while preparing this work.