ABSTRACT
In 1998-1999, the African American artist Kara Walker decorated the safety curtain of the Vienna State Opera with a work created specially for the season. On 176 square meters of material, she showed a shadowy world of silhouettes of jungle trees and hills on a white-gold background with bizarre moving fi gures. They were all a critical allusion to the exoticism connected with the opera but also to German-Austrian fascism and the linked racifi cation of cultures.1
