A 13-metre (42ft) statue that draws on the legacies of Queen Victoria, the British empire and the transatlantic slave trade could help trigger a radical reassessment of public monuments in Britain, according to its curator.
Kara Walker’s Fons Americanus fountain, which opens to the public on Wednesday 2 October and is the latest Turbine Hall commission at Tate Modern, was inspired by the Queen Victoria memorial outside Buckingham Palace.
The Tate Modern curator Clara Kim said the hope was the work would ignite fresh debate of public monuments in Britain. “We hope that it encourages people to visit the commission itself, and then go back out into the city to look at where these monuments come from and the official accounts of our histories,” she said.
Described as a “sardonic counterprogram to the celebration of empire”, Walker was inspired by the Queen Victoria memorial after seeing it from her taxi window on the way to Heathrow, after accepting the Tate commission. The huge monument was also inspired by the Trevi fountain in Rome, and contains references to Damien Hirst’s formaldehyde shark, Winslow Homer’s Gulf Stream and JMW Turner’s Slave Ship.
At a press conference on Monday, Walker said when she first visited Europe she was shocked by the grand scale of colonial-era monuments. “I think as an American girl coming to Europe for the first time as an art student, I was perversely moved by the grandeur of the palaces,” she said. “Because it really is very jarring when you think about what that’s built on the backs of.”
Walker said there was a direct comparison between the Confederate statues in the US, which have polarised opinion and triggered a debate about whether they are inherently racist, and monuments to the British empire such as the Victoria memorial. “It’s only really recently that there’s been a concerted national conversation about these monuments, about how they got there and what they mean,” she said.
The artist, best-known for her 2014 work A Subtlety, the huge sphinx-like figure she housed in an old sugar factory, told the Guardian the Turbine Hall commission was an “irresistible … grand prize”, and that she had had to educate herself about the history of race and Britain in preparation.
Hilton Als, the New Yorker critic and curator of a solo show at Sprüth Magers that coincides with her Tate commission, said Walker was a “social critic with heart” whose work has consistently explored America and Britain’s shared and complex racial history.
“One of the things that is powerful about Walker is her work about slavery, and how black people were traded by the British and Portuguese,” said Als. “The African-American relationship to Britain is a very complicated one and she is again examining it in a powerful way.”
Walker said both Kehinde Wiley’s newly installed Times Square monument, Rumors of War, which is 8 metres (26ft) tall and references Confederate statues, and her own Turbine Hall commission formed “an interesting moment for monumentality”. “What the Confederate debate and removal of statues from places like New Orleans has done is not just reignited the debate, but unearthed the racism and cruelties that have lived fairly quietly under the surface for some time,” she said.
Als said both works addressing Confederate and colonial monuments showed both artists’ desire to engage with contemporary issues.
“It’s like James Baldwin said, he never wanted to be in an ivory tower cultivating his talent, he wanted to be out in the world expressing it,” he said. “It’s a continuation of this idea that the artist wants to be in the moment and commenting on the world around them.”
