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Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter
Four-decade retrospective of Carrie Mae Weems: over 100 photographs and videos, from the Kitchen Table Series and Family Pictures and Stories to her new Preach series.
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In the Museums series, Carrie Mae Weems stands in a black dress with her back to the camera, facing the Louvre and other museums, printed wall-sized. Reviewing the show, Sholem Krishtalka wrote that she becomes "a void in the picture plane."
There are more than 100 photographs and videos from four decades. Family Pictures and Stories pairs family snapshots with her own texts. In the Kitchen Table Series (1990) you sit at the missing fourth side of an oblong table while Weems plays lover and mother, and the text panels drift from a love story into soul and blues lyrics. Preach (2024) turns to Black churches, and Leave Now! uses Pepper's ghost, a 19th-century stage illusion, to tell her grandfather's story as an Arkansas tenant farmer.
Krishtalka called the work "profound, absorbing and beautiful"; his complaint was the docent tour. The audioguide has Weems herself talking you through selected works. Tickets are €15, free up to 18, and free for everyone on Monday 2 November.
Editor's pick
Weems narrates the audioguide herself, from Family Pictures and Stories through the Kitchen Table Series to the Pepper's ghost installation Leave Now!. Sholem Krishtalka called the work "profound, absorbing and beautiful".
Look for
The kitchen table
Look for Weems at an oblong table with shifting company, while the text panels between the prints slide from prose into soul and blues lyrics.
Weems at the Louvre
A wall-sized print from the Museums series: Weems in a black dress, back to the camera, a dark figure against the museum's architecture.
The Rothko Chapel, without the Rothkos
In Preach, Weems photographs the chapel's light and shadow instead of the paintings, and appears in it only as a silhouette.
Leave Now!
A video installation using the 19th-century Pepper's ghost illusion to tell the story of her grandfather Frank Weems, a tenant farmer in Arkansas.
Family Pictures and Stories
The earliest work here, from 1978 to 1984: Weems's own family photographs hung with her autobiographical texts.
Good for
- Evening Visits
- Going Solo
- Teenagers
With kids
Visitors up to 18 get in free, and C/O Berlin runs Teens Workshops on 19 to 22 October.
Also at C/O Berlin
On now nearby
Nearby
Image credits
6
- Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter© Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy the artist and Gladstone, New York, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, and Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin
- Rooms / Stages© Jana Sophia Nolle / © VG Bild-Kunst Bonn 2026
- Helmut Newton's One-off Album© Helmut Newton Foundation
- Intermezzo: Revisiting Helmut Newton© Newton Foundation / Photo: Gerhard Kassner
- C/O BerlinRaimond Spekking / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
- Museum für FotografieA.Savin / Wikimedia Commons