Work of the Week: Kara Walker’s Prince McVeigh and the Turner Blasphemies (2021)⁣ Walker’s film installation looks to The Turner Diaries as a means of exploring America’s painful history of racial violence. Walker’s title refers to Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, and the book that was a key touchstone for him. Known as the Bible of far-right extremists in America, The Turner Diaries describes a violent Aryan takeover of the United States. McVeigh slept with a copy under his pillow and emulated the book’s protagonist by exploding a huge truck bomb outside a federal building, killing 168 people and injuring 500 others in 1995. Walker’s film imagines a nightmarish America as seen from a white supremacist point of view, in which McVeigh is a dashing hero and acts of grotesque violence against Black people are carried out with impunity. The true nightmare, of course, is that a number of the terrifying scenes enacted by the film’s cut- paper marionettes are based on real events. In the miasma of hatred and horror spun by Walker, no one is innocent. Not the silhouette figures performing their unspeakable acts; not us, as viewers; not the artist, whose hands – or those of a puppeteer acting on her behalf – are intermittently visible, manipulating the marionettes. 📝 Written extract from In the Black Fantastic curator Ekow Eshun (@ekoweshun) - the complete version of this text can be found in the #ExhibitionCatalogue for In the Black Fantastic published by Hayward Gallery Publishing & Thames & Hudson Photography Credit: Pete Woodhead 📍 Hayward Gallery (London) 📅 Until 18 September 2022 #KaraWalker [@kara_walker_official] #Video #VideoArt #AmericanHistory #AlternativeHistory #TurnerDiaries #TimothyMcVeigh #OklahomaCityBomber #WhiteSupremacy #CivilWar #Puppets #sillhouette #Afrofuturism #Folklore #Mythology #ScienceFiction #SciFi #Installation #Art #BlackArt #BlackArtist #Gallery #HaywardGallery #SouthbankCentre