You walk into the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall and your breath just sort of hitches. It’s not just the size, though the scale is frankly ridiculous. It’s the smell of damp stone and the sound of 35 tons of water rushing through a 13-meter-tall monument that looks like it’s been there for a century, even though it was built out of cork and wood in 2019.
When Kara Walker took over the Turbine Hall for the Hyundai Commission, she didn’t just make art. She built a time machine that was also a middle finger to colonial nostalgia. The piece, officially titled Fons Americanus, is a sprawling, four-tiered fountain that looks remarkably like the Victoria Memorial sitting outside Buckingham Palace. But look closer. Instead of celebrating "British values" or imperial grit, Walker’s fountain is populated by sharks, drowning figures, and a Venus that isn't exactly Botticelli’s.
It’s messy. It’s brutal. Honestly, it’s one of the most important things to happen to the London art scene in the last decade.
The Monument Most People Got Wrong
At a glance, a lot of tourists in 2019 probably thought they were looking at a classic piece of Victorian architecture. That’s the point. Walker is obsessed with the "invisibility" of monuments. We walk past these giant stone guys on horses every day and never ask who they killed to get that statue.
Walker’s fountain forces the question.
At the very top sits an African Venus, but she’s not just standing there looking pretty. Water doesn’t just flow from her; it sprays from her breasts and a gash in her neck. It’s visceral. Underneath her, the tiers are packed with figures that reference the Transatlantic slave trade—the "Black Atlantic," as scholar Paul Gilroy calls it.
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Why the Sharks Matter
If you spent any time looking at the base of the fountain, you saw the sharks. They aren’t just there for the "cool" factor. They’re a direct nod to J.M.W. Turner’s 1840 painting, The Slave Ship, where enslaved people were thrown overboard so the ship owners could collect insurance money.
Walker even threw in a meta-reference to Damien Hirst. She titled one section of the fountain The Physical Impossibility of Blackness in the Mind of Someone White, mocking Hirst's famous shark-in-formaldehyde piece. It’s that mix of high-art snark and deep, historical trauma that makes her work so hard to categorize.
Not Just a Big Statue: The Engineering Secrets
People usually assume these massive Turbine Hall installations are made of solid stone or heavy concrete. Nope. Fons Americanus was a miracle of sustainable engineering.
The whole thing was basically a giant puzzle of:
- Portuguese cork (thousands of sheets of it)
- Untreated softwood
- FSC spruce plywood
- Jesmonite (a non-toxic composite used for the "stone" finish)
The fabrication team, a group called millimetre, worked with Walker to make sure the whole thing could be recycled. When the exhibition ended in April 2020, the cork was destined to be turned into soil improver. There's something poetic about a monument to "forgotten" history being literally ground back into the earth.
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The Shell Grotto: The Part You Might Have Missed
While everyone was staring at the 43-foot-tall fountain, there was a second, smaller piece called the Shell Grotto. It sat near the entrance, looking like a giant oyster shell. Inside, instead of a pearl, there was the face of a crying boy, nearly submerged in his own tears.
This wasn’t just a sad image. It was a specific reference to Bunce Island in Sierra Leone. That island was a major hub for the slave trade, a "commercial fort" where people were branded and loaded onto ships. By putting this small, intimate tragedy at the entrance, Walker made sure you couldn't enjoy the "spectacle" of the big fountain without acknowledging the human cost first.
Why We’re Still Talking About It
Art usually has a shelf life. You see it, you post a photo, you move on. But Kara Walker’s Turbine Hall takeover happened right before the world shifted.
A few months after the fountain was dismantled, the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 saw statues of slave traders like Edward Colston being dumped into harbors. Suddenly, Walker’s "anti-monument" felt less like an art project and more like a prophecy. She was already doing the work of "decolonizing" the public square before it was a viral hashtag.
She calls herself an "unreliable narrator." She doesn't give you a straight history lesson with dates and names. Instead, she gives you a "gift" (her words, written on the gallery wall in a mocking, circus-style font) that forces you to deal with the gross, tangled reality of how the modern world was actually built.
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How to "Read" a Kara Walker Piece
If you're looking at Walker's work—whether it's her famous paper silhouettes or her massive sculptures—don't look for a "hero." There usually isn't one.
- Look for the silhouettes. She uses the Victorian art of paper-cutting to hide horrific violence in plain sight.
- Check the titles. They are usually long, sarcastic, and full of wordplay about the "Old World" vs. the "New World."
- Find the humor. It sounds weird, but Walker uses "funhouse horror." There’s a satirical edge to her work that makes the medicine go down, even when the subject matter is devastating.
- Notice the material. From 80 tons of sugar (her 2014 sphinx in Brooklyn) to the cork in London, the material always relates to the trade history she's critiquing.
Actionable Takeaways for Art Lovers
If you missed the physical installation, you haven't totally lost out. The Tate has an incredible digital archive of the Hyundai Commission that lets you see the blueprints and the "making of" films.
Go look up the Victoria Memorial next time you're in Green Park. Then, pull up a photo of Fons Americanus. Comparing the two is the best way to understand how art can be used to talk back to power. It's not about "erasing" history; it's about adding the pages that were ripped out.
Next time you see a public monument, ask yourself: who is this for, and what is it hiding? That’s the real legacy of Kara Walker’s time in the Turbine Hall. It changed the way we look at the "official" version of the world.