Every visit to C/O Berlin serves as a reminder of just how much weight photography can carry. This autumn, the figure set to evoke that feeling most acutely is Carrie Mae Weems. Having opened on September 12 and running through March 2027, The Heart of the Matter brings the American artist’s four-decade career into view through more than 100 photographic and video works.
The opening night took place on September 11, right at the heart of Berlin Art Week. Sharing a moment alongside Weems’s presence within the distinctive architecture of the Amerika-Haus promises an unforgettable encounter.
“Who remains visible, and who stays invisible?”
The exhibition poses this very question to itself, attempting an answer across four decades of photography. Weems has built her entire career around a core set of inquiries: Who writes history? Whose story is preserved? What does a photographic frame enclose, and what does it exclude?
Race, gender, memory, power—in Weems’s hands, these notions never collapse into cold theory. At their core, there is always a deeply tangible lived experience.
Kitchen Table Series — A Life Around a Table
Widely regarded as one of the most seminal bodies of work in photographic history since 1990, the Kitchen Table Series comprises photographs Weems staged at her own kitchen table. Love, motherhood, solitude, power—all converge around that singular piece of furniture. Here, the kitchen—traditionally a domestic, everyday space for women—transforms into a theatrical stage and a site of existential assertion.
It may feel familiar at first glance. Yet the longer you linger, the more nuances surface—and that is precisely what Weems intends.
Family Pictures and Stories — Where Do We Come From?
Initiated between 1978 and 1984 by photographing her own family, the Family Pictures and Stories series functions as both a personal document and an archive of collective memory. As scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. observed, “There is almost no distance between Weems and her work.” Navigating this series makes that statement immediately clear. The personal is political, yet Weems demonstrates this not as a slogan, but through the photographic frame itself.
Museums — Looking In From the Outside of the Institution
The ongoing Museums series (2006–present) captures museums, plaques, monuments, and historical sites through a critical lens. Weems interrogates her positioning as a Black woman within these institutions, questioning how she appears within—or remains excluded from—that history. Spanning plantations to cathedrals, government edifices to cultural institutions, this body of work strikingly exposes how power communicates through spatial architecture.
Preach — The Most Recent Body of Work
Dating to 2024, the Preach series addresses the Black church, though far beyond a mere sanctuary of faith. Weems conceives of this site as “a historical epicenter of resistance and organization.” Serving as the backbone of the Civil Rights Movement, the church continues to face violence today, and Weems refuses to let that reality recede into oblivion.
Podcast and Audio Guide — Weems Lends Her Own Voice
In the audio guide accompanying the exhibition, visitors can listen to Weems’s own commentary on her works. There is also an accompanying podcast series exploring representation, memory, and Weems’s relationship with Berlin. These additions prove invaluable; to fully engage with Weems, one requires ears as much as eyes.
Why Visit?
Because while narrating American history, Weems’s work poses a deeply universal question: Is visibility a right or a privilege? Posing this question through photography—a medium so often presumed to be objective—stands as one of the most compelling gestures in contemporary art.
