Her critique of history, carved in clay.
LONDON — The Queen Victoria Memorial, centerpiece of the plaza that fronts Buckingham Palace, is possibly the city’s most bombastic monument to British grandeur.
Beside Victoria, queen and empress, is a cascade of allegorical statuary. Ship’s prows jut from the corners. Bas-relief mermaids and mermen watch over its fountain pool. Dedicated in 1911, the edifice projects the historical certainty and moral satisfaction of the Britannia that ruled the waves.
Kara Walker was on her way to Heathrow Airport from her initial site visit to the Tate Modern, after being selected for the museum’s annual Turbine Hall commission, when she saw the memorial from her taxi.
“I hadn’t even seen it before,” Ms. Walker recalled at her Brooklyn studio. “I took a bunch of pictures.”
Ms. Walker’s installation, the latest in the high-profile series that began in 2000 with Louise Bourgeois, recently opened in the atrium of the power plant-turned-museum, and runs until April.
She has built a twisted counterpart to the Victoria Memorial — a fountain whose jets emerge from the nipples and open jugular of a Venus figure 12 meters up, feeding a basin populated by sailors and sharks. On the monument’s core and around its edges, she has installed allegorical figures that display her hallmark style — grotesque, often violent, and layered with art-historical references and cultural comment.
Ms. Walker presents her countermemorial, titled “Fons Americanus” — the Fountain of America — as an offering from a colonial subject: “A Gift and Talisman” for “the Citizens of the Old World (Our Captors, Saviours, and Intimate Family),” from “That Celebrated Negress of the New World, Madame Kara E. Walker.”
The work flows coherently from Ms. Walker’s well-known genus of drawings, silhouette cutouts, films and sculptures that explore domination and resistance, particularly in the plantation context, with unflinching attention to its moral and physical perversions.
It has made her one of the fundamental contemporary investigators of the American psyche, and of the racial anxieties that the United States has yet to purge. But her projects overflow national boundaries and respond to history that began well before the arrival of enslaved Africans in America in 1619.
“It does drive me a little bit crazy when I see references to my work that say ‘slavery in America,’” she said. “I’m talking about power dynamics, kind of universally, and also in the New World, or in the world that was created by the imperial project.”
Now, in London, she has made her way to the source. “It’s a reversal of the triangle trade, going from America via Africa back to England,” she said. “Or thinking of it as a different shape — a circle, a cycle.”
Coming up with the idea took time. She found herself fixating on water, then fountains, and remembered her photos of the memorial. “And it was waiting for me,” she said.
The irregular finish of the statues contrasts with the sheen of the pedestal and the lip of the fountain, suggesting a story in motion, said Clara Kim, a Tate curator.
“Her intention was that it is a memorial that is in the process of being formed,” Ms. Kim said. “As if emerging from the ground, from the depths of history.”
The parts that riff directly off the Victoria Memorial read as biting satire. One figure, “The Captain,” scowling and with legs spread, is inspired by Marcus Garvey or the fictional Emperor Jones, both liberation fighters turned autocratic. There is also “Queen Vicky,” a caricatural African figure carrying a coconut, whose skirt shelters a figure Ms. Walker calls “Melancholy.” Another, “Angel,” is a tree trunk and branches, from which a thick noose dangles. Placed about the basin, some partially submerged, are scenes that allude to artworks that treat the dread of the Middle Passage.
Ms. Walker drew a connection to the deaths of migrants in the Mediterranean. “It can’t really be spoken so much,” she said. “The ocean is the thing that matters. The river, the water, it’s the entity that really knows.”
Is London ready? Ms. Kim said it should be.
“We didn’t know when we invited her that she was going to do something on monuments,” she said. “But it’s such an apropos subject given the discourses that are happening now around re-evaluating monuments, certainly in the context of the United States. It’s important that those conversations happen here as well.”
Ms. Walker envisioned the work as being for the British public — caught up, like the American public, in building a pluralistic society. “I think of it in terms of people,” she said of her monument. “A gift toward some democratic ideal.”