Kara Walker: Burning Village / Inhabiting the Shadows

The Institut Valencià d’Art Modern (IVAM) opens a new chapter this autumn under the direction of Blanca de la Torre with two exhibitions: Kara Walker. Burning Village and Inhabiting the Shadows. Conceived as parallel yet interwoven projects—one a solo presentation, the other a group show—both employ the notion of shadow as a conceptual tool to address identity, memory, and violence. At first glance, the reliance on black and white might seem like a formal simplification or a rhetorical device within the curatorial narrative. Yet this choice stems from a deeper impulse: memory’s resistance to categorization, evoked here as a metaphor for black-and-white imaginaries.

Inhabiting the Shadows, curated by Blanca de la Torre and Rosa Castells, brings together regional, national, and international artists including Douglas Gordon, Rachel Whiteread, Berta Cáccamo, Paz Errázuriz, Thomas Ruff, Louise Bourgeois, Cristina Iglesias, Bernd & Hilla Becher, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Rula Halawani, Joseph Beuys, Carmen Calvo, Katharina Fritsch, Anthony Caro, Cristina García Rodero, and Cindy Sherman, among others.

The exhibition explores what persists in shadow, where light and darkness intertwine with notions of both individual and collective memory. Across roughly one hundred works, the black-and-white image assumes a central role. Drawing on the collections of IVAM and MACA, the curatorial framework engages cinematic language and the atmosphere of film noir. Literature and poetry weave through the exhibition as a meta-narrative, with verses by Alejandra Pizarnik in dialogue with Marguerite Yourcenar, Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison, Concha Méndez, and Valencian poet María Beneyto.

Kara Walker: Burning Village, curated by Rosa Castells, offers a comprehensive overview of Walker’s four-decade career. Through drawing, printmaking, sculpture, video, and installation, she examines U.S. narratives and myths—misremembered histories, complicit continuities, and violent ruptures. Her practice probes the representation of race in modern and contemporary art, foregrounding the urgency of forging new narratives that challenge inherited views of history. Walker’s imagery—rooted in historical realism as much as in imaginative invention—compels through emotional force, intellectual rigor, and striking visual power.

The exhibition features forty-four works from the Michael Jenkins and Javier Romero Collection at MACA, spanning the entirety of Walker’s practice and constituting one of the most significant holdings of her work in any European institution.