This extensive retrospective is a complex exhibition that offers an overview of conceptual artist Carrie Mae Weems‘ entire body of work. Weems uses photography to confront and narrate significant and profound issues, encouraging viewers to explore them. Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter is on at the Gallerie d’Italia – Turin, Intesa Sanpaolo Museum and features around a hundred works, including a project commissioned specifically for the exhibition by Intesa Sanpaolo.
Preach – this is the project – is an installation with multiple layers of meaning. A poem by Weems is accompanying the installation, telling us: “In the flames and among the bombs, pray where and when you can … From your secret hiding place you have discovered new forms of worship…”. The series explores the fervent forms of worship that are characteristic of Weems’ Black church experience, while denouncing the violence and oppression inextricably linked to this history.
Preach blends early images from Harlem, San Diego and Sea Island with new works that evoke the transcendental and secular nature of religious expression for Black Americans today. “My work focuses on describing simply and directly those aspects of American culture in need of deeper illumination”, Weems explains. As in many of Weems’ other series, a human figure appears here. It is an emblematic presence that looks like it has a meaning beyond reality. It’s a memorable figure that gets you thinking and stays in your mind long after you’ve seen her.
Weems herself points out she started taking photographs of herself, realizing that she is, literally, in front and behind the camera at the same time.
“I’m both subject and object, performer and director. I (…) realized that I’ve been acting/performing/observing in this way for years. This woman can stand in the historical moment and bear witness to the past, the present, and the public/private memories that have shaped our lives as Black people here in America. I discovered that I was the point of reference, and the point of view (…). Then I realised that this photographic self was a muse and a guide to the unknown”, she says. As Weems explains, she is a performative character: “I call her my muse (…). She’s my alter-ego. But she has a very real function in my work life. The muse made her first appearance in Kitchen Table (1990, ed.); this woman can stand in for me and for you; she can stand in for the audience; she leads you into history. She is a witness and a guide”.
As curator Sarah Meister says, “Weems placed her subjectivity at the centre as an expansive construct. Even when she pointed her camera at family and friends, these encounters were foregrounded as her own relationships and part of a personal narrative”. Her family, for instance, becomes the representational vehicle through which she engages in the larger discussion of race, class, and historical migration.
The retrospective also includes works such as Museums (2006 – ongoing), Scenes and Takes (2016) e Painting the Town (2021) and video installations, including The Shape of Things (2021) and Leave Now! (2022). Afro-descendant American, Carrie Mae Weems is an artist, who confronts constructions of race and femininity seekimg new models to live by.
Based on her unique experience as a black woman, yet universal in her explorations of family relationships, cultural identity, power structures and social hierarchy, her artistic practice primarily focuses on photography, but also incorporates text, audio, installations, objects and video. Her background as an anthropologist has led her to investigate folkloric traditions using social science observation methods, as well as appropriating and adapting archival and ethnographic images. Through her photography, she highlights the historical omission of Black women from institutions and art canons. Much of her recent and current work focuses on power and architecture.
The exhibition at the Gallerie d’Italia – Turin is sponsored by the Region of Piedmont and the City of Turin, and has been produced in collaboration with Aperture Foundation.
It’s accompanied by a catalogue published by Società Allemandi together with Aperture.
The museum in Turin (dedicated to photography and video), together with those in Milan, Naples and Vicenza, is part of Intesa Sanpaolo’s Gallerie d’Italia museum project.
Paola Sammartano
Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter
April 17 to September 7, 2025
Gallerie d’Italia – Turin, Intesa Sanpaolo Museum
Piazza San Carlo 156
10121 Turin, Italy
https://gallerieditalia.com/en/turin/
