Walking into Sprüth Magers Gallery — tucked between the riverside drift of Monbijou Park and the secluded greenery of Krausnick Park in Berlin’s city centre — I catch the quiet hum of the space just as another visitor steps in behind me, black tote slung over their shoulder marked in white lettering that reads: DESTROY WHITE SUPREMACY.
The humble tote has become one of the art world’s most successful soft-power devices: a cheap rectangle of canvas that somehow circulates more cultural capital than most catalog essays. Capable of moving from streetwear to salon accessory without changing its register, it often acts as a discreet indicator of mood, like a forensic tool of the zeitgeist. It also doubles as a low-stakes billboard, broadcasting everything from institutional critique to performative solidarities in ethically sourced cotton.
Here, it almost feels like wearing a band’s T-shirt to their concert: a small gesture that folds identification into anticipation, signalling not only a provisional safe space, but also an engagement with the work of Kara Walker and the interrogation of power, erasure, and the uneasy weight of what has been written — only to be repeatedly rewritten — over time. In this setting, the tote takes on a talismanic quality, quietly preparing the viewer for what awaits inside.
And yet, in Berlin — a city where political consciousness circulates with the casual fluency of street style — such statements often slip into a kind of performative shorthand. The boundary between protest and personal branding can become porous, each feeding the other in ways that complicate intention. This tension, the soft friction between dissent and display, became an unexpected key to navigating Walker’s Dispatches from A—and the Museum of Half-remembered Histories.
Once inside, watercolour drawings and collages depict a familiar cast of figures. Some are uncannily identifiable while others remain abstractly relatable — like open-ended stand-ins or perhaps a broader diaspora of archetypes. When I ask her whether the pole-dancing Trump lookalike really is who I think it is, Walker hesitates to confirm, leaving the caricature open for interpretation. Like a jiggling jester, his dance captures a familiar choreography of power dynamics: spectacle displaces consequence, performance eclipses accountability, and distraction becomes the infrastructure through which events are shaped and remembered.
Walker stages history as something unstable and partial, something recited rather than recovered, where what remains is less a complete narrative than a collection of gestures — fragments that insist, however quietly, on being reckoned with. Here, performativity is not incidental; it structures the very conditions under which history is produced and perceived. Manufactured even.
Similarly, a black paper silhouette collage — a style for which Walker is well known — incorporates recognisable figures through the presidential side profile. Etched on coins, stamps, and medallions, this pose doesn’t just record history. It performs it — broadcasting strength, gravitas, and authority, quietly masking propaganda as memorabilia.
Another collage presents an inversion of a similar assemblage of profiles, this time working through negative space in a kind of optical puzzle. The eye doesn’t know where to settle. Is the image black, or white?
Do we read the words themselves, or the intervals between them? From this altered vantage point, the composition exposes the gaps between shapes and, with them, the absences, erasures, and exclusions that structure historical representation. Almost like a pictorial analogue to Wag the Dog, the image is a reminder of how confusion, distraction, and spectacle can so easily skew perception, leaving the viewer unsure of what is being shown — and what is being concealed.
Hung salon-style, the pictures line the walls like those of a private gallery, a gesture that — along with the language used in and around the exhibition — lends the space an uncanny air, somewhere between the intimacy of a domestic drawing room and the authority of a historical museum.
Rather than being described as a collection, the works are repeatedly referred to as a suite. While the contextual meaning of this word simply refers to a group of related drawings, the term carries faint echoes of exclusivity, private access, and domestic privilege. It feels like the controlled circulation that continues to dictate a culture of gatekeeping — an afterimage of aristocratic patronage and elite interior display.
It also harps back to modernist use of suites in the 19th and early 20th centuries, when artists grouped drawings or prints to assert intentionality, cultivate rarity, and align themselves with older traditions of connoisseurship, elevating individually made works into a conceptually unified whole. In the exhibition, suite seems to signal curatorial deliberation and a certain degree of refinement, carrying the aura of archival order and controlled interpretation — both forms of classification that historically determined which narratives were preserved, and which were, well, not.
The new suite incorporates colour and material experimentation not before seen in her work, as colour becomes a tool for both revelation and disorientation. In one scene, two archetypal colonial figures gesture violently toward a group whose warm skin tones pop against the institutional navy of the white men’s coats.
The hues, though quietly muted, carry a painful intensity. Violence resonates through subtleties of tone and contrast, as well as the deeply emotive expressions drawn on tiny, fragile faces. Aptly titled Faction, the work depicts a recurring format: a pile of people, swarming and flailing in a kaleidoscopic mess.
The same uncompromising blue reappears in a small figure being sheltered — perhaps in imagination — by a monumental nude body reminiscent of the giant traveller Gulliver. Its glassy skin forms an A-frame, equal parts refuge and architecture of control. On either side, two more diminutive figures rendered in warm, muted tones strain against the giant’s bulky legs, which seem to grow from the ground like invasive trees. The action remains ambiguous, but the colonial figure’s ease — his relaxed claim over space — demonstrates how little force is required to assert dominance. Authority, it seems, often operates not through exertion but through the quiet normalisation of presence.
If this scene feels uncanny, it is because Walker stages not only recognisable bodies but the very mechanics of power. History, as she reminds us, is never neutral. It is, like the story of Gulliver, a fantasy that is authored.
“Fantasy rules our world now,” Walker writes — a succinct articulation of our political unreality. But her invocation of “fantasy” is neither fantastical nor escapist; it is diagnostic: these works demonstrate that the myth of neutrality and theatrics of authority (whether national, artistic, or curatorial) are themselves fantasies with material stakes.
A useful historical point of reference is Charles Willson Peale’s 1822 painting The Artist in His Museum. In that self-portrait, Peale dramatically pulls back a velvet curtain to reveal his museum — a long gallery filled with natural specimens, including taxidermy birds, fossils, portraits, and other objects. The painting is deeply performative: Peale presents himself as the authoritative mediator of knowledge, staging his museum as a site where culture, nationhood, and spectacle converge.
Where Peale revels in classificatory certainty — his “collection” harmoniously ordered for public enlightenment — Walker exposes the violence embedded in such order. By disfiguring and reanimating her source imagery, she reveals the lingering institutional authority that underwrote Peale’s world and continues to shape ours. Like corrupted artefacts, her works are fugitive, unstable, and slipping between registers. They feel more alive than the dead and definitive objects of Peale’s museum. They transform the white cube into a kind of counter-museum, a space not of taxonomic clarity but of systemic breakdown.
Pictured below: (Details) Kara Walker, Factions, 2025, watercolour, gofun and ink on paper, 56.5 x 76.8 cm
The exhibition takes on added urgency in the context of the current American moment. Donald Trump’s renewed attempts to discipline cultural production, slash arts funding, and enforce a narrow patriotic canon inadvertently confirm what Walker already knows: those in power recognise the subversive capacity of images.
Her figures may be fantastical, but their effects are not. If the present can be shaped by myth, then myth can also be weaponised against the present. White supremacy can be dismantled — but only once its narrative architecture is exposed, confronted, and reimagined. Walker’s work renders these structures visible, graspable, and therefore newly vulnerable.
Yet to read the exhibition solely through an American frame is to miss the fuller extent of its critique. As an American, I am always quickest to indict my own nation — its historical violence feels both familiar and mine to name. But criticism attaches differently depending on who speaks and from where. The fact that the exhibition opens in Berlin is not incidental; it positions the work within a city whose own narratives of guilt, moral vigilance, and institutionalised remembrance shape how violence is seen, disavowed, or displaced. Berlin becomes more than just a backdrop but a second subject, sharpening the exhibition’s universality while insisting that its questions be understood in situ.
In a city that still negotiating its imperial ghosts, the question of who gets to look — and how — is charged long before anyone enters the gallery. Germany’s relationship to race, empire, and colonialism is often displaced onto American narratives, permitting audiences to critique racism at a comfortable distance. Walker collapses that distance. Her imagery of domination, sexualised power, and mythic national identity reflects not only American contradictions but European ones. Viewed in Berlin, her source material — Popular History of the United States — becomes a mirror for the Popular History of the West.
The violence she re-stages belongs to a transatlantic continuum. It exposes the fantastical desire to believe in closure, in lessons learned, in the redemptive promise of memory. Walker denies such comforts. She shows how the visual languages of history — illustration, monument, museum — remain complicit in the fantasy of innocence.
Thus the exhibition in Berlin becomes not a critique of the past, but an inquiry into the political mechanics of the present. The cutouts, watercolours, and pastels ask:
Who is authoring the narratives we live in right now?
Which fantasies are granted the status of truth?
And how do these fictions shape the historical record of the future?
Walker’s art is not about the past; it is about how the past animates the infrastructures of perception. Even the word America — foregrounded in her titles and sources, but also annotated and abstracted — demands caution. Fantasy is not confined by national boundaries. It travels freely, exerts power transnationally, and survives long after empires dissolve.
To stand before these works is to encounter the unsettling possibility that what we call “American history” is not bounded by the United States at all, but recirculates globally as a sick, governing logic — a mode of seeing, categorising, and legitimising. Walker’s images reveal how immediately that logic resonates, even in Berlin, even within ourselves.
They urge us to consider not only what America has enacted, but why its narrative structures reappear elsewhere with such ease, and what it signifies that they persist far from their supposed point of origin. The names of places and actors shift — perhaps because they were never essential. In this sense, the exhibition offers less a lesson in America than an invitation to examine the transnational habits of looking that empire leaves behind.
Kara Walker
Dispatches from A— and the Museum of Half-remembered Histories
Sprüth Magers Gallery
Oranienburgerstraße 18
10178 Berlin
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