The Art of Storytelling in Kara Walker’s Film and Video

This essay considers several film and video works by American artist Kara Walker, focusing specifically on three issues: the artist’s transition from silhouettes and works on paper to video, the challenges of displaying her video work in a gallery context, and the narrative impact of her video. Throughout, the essay argues that the differences between Walker’s video and paper-based works have less to do with media, and more to do with issues around production and display that allow video to push harder on certain pressure points that have always been important within Walker’s practice: the constructed nature of historical fantasy, for example, as well as viewers’ cultural reliance on storytelling to remember and reimagine the past.