Kara Walker’s new commission remakes the language of monuments through allusions and references to the slavery age. 

The Turbine Hall at London’s Tate Modern is a cavernous maw that swallows and spits out all but the most confident artists. Kara Walker, the latest to have undertaken the annual commission in the echoing central chamber of the former power station, is equal to its challenge. The African American artist has built a 13-metre-tall fountain, a play on the Queen Victoria Memorial outside Buckingham Palace. It subverts the tropes of Britain’s pompous public monuments, and offers a mordant commentary on the nation’s enrichment through the transatlantic slave trade.

Like the Victoria Memorial – which is peopled with allegories of Agriculture, Manufacture, Peace, Progress, Constancy and Courage, all surmounted by Victory – Walker’s fountain, Fons Americanus, teems with encoded figures. The scenes on her fountain – a woman who might be Queen Victoria receiving a bowed captive, a pietà in which a drowned figure is cradled in tender arms, a tree stump from which a noose dangles, sea captains enthroned in pomp – pulse with references to the history of empire, slavery and resistance... [+]