PHOTO:Carrie Mae Weems-The Heart of the Matter
Carrie Mae Weems is one of the most influential contemporary artists. Her work explores how images create history, form memory, and determine who is seen and who remains invisible. Using her own biography as a starting point, she develops an oeuvre that goes far beyond the personal and investigates issues of identity, belon- ging, and representation. To this end, she employs documentary, staged, and con- ceptual strategies, developing a visual language that is equally poetic and political.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: C/O Berlin Archive
“The Heart of the Matter” is the title, of an extensive retrospective of the work oft Carrie Mae Weems. For more than four decades, she has examined issues of power and memory in photographs, videos, and installations. Her oeuvre particularly unpacks and confronts construc- tions of race and femininity in the pursuit of new models to live by. With more than one hundred photographs and videos spanning key early works to recent pieces, the exhibition shows the depth and diversity of an artistic practice that links personal experiences with social and historical issues. Among her early works is the series “Family Pictures and Stories” (1978–84), in which Weems combines photographs of family members with autobiographical texts. In addition to being a private place defining personal relationships, family becomes a carrier of collective memory and cultural identity. In her iconic “Kitchen Table Series” (1990), Weems focuses on domestic space as a stage for interpersonal relation- ships. At the kitchen table, she takes on various roles and explores issues of love, partnership, motherhood, gender roles, and self-determination. The pictures take up numerous references to literature, music, and art history, including Langston Hughes’s and Roy DeCarava’s “The Sweet Flypaper of Life” and song lyrics that complement her complex visual language. Now considered a seminal work of contemporary photography, the series marks a turning point in Weems’s artistic exploration of identity and representation.
The exhibition expands from the privacy of authentic and constructed family life to a public understanding places and environments. Ranging from film studios and plantations in the American South, to museums and monuments around the world, special consideration is given to how these sites are seen and whose point of view they represent. Weems examines these spaces as places of memory and power, revealing how historical narratives are created. Her oeuvre opens up new ways of seeing institutions and visual traditions that continue to shape our understanding of history. The exhibition also includes a new series about Black communities of faith and their importance for solidarity, spirituality, and resistance. Central to the exhibition, “Preach” (2024) combines early photographs with new images that trace their religion and spirituality over generations. The series acknowledges forms of belief and a richness of community as well as its history, rooted in experiences of violence and oppression.
The video installation” Leave Now!” (2022) presents a family anecdote via a 19th century stage technique known as Pepper’s ghost. Based on the story of her grandfather Frank Weems, a tenant farmer in Arkansas and member of the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union, Weems exemplifies the realities of life for Black agricultural laborers in the American South by this personal narrative. Over many decades, Carrie Mae Weems has created an oeuvre that expands the possibilities of creative storytelling. Her works link personal experience with historical and political narrative and repeatedly challenge viewers to reassess their own concepts of history, identity, and belonging.
Photo: Carrie Mae Weems, Painting the Town #4, 2021; from the series Painting the Town, © Carrie Mae Weems and reproduced courtesy the artist and Gladstone, New York, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, and Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin
Info: Curator: Sarah Hermanson Meiste, C/O Berlin, Amerika Haus,, Hardenbergstraße 22-24, Berlin, Germany, Duration: 12/9/2026-3/2/224, Days & Hours: Daily 11:00-20:00, https://co-berlin.org/
