I saw Carrie Mae Weems’s retrospective "The Heart of the Matter" at C/O Berlin on 10 September 2026. The show is installed at C/O Berlin and collects decades of work from her earliest family pictures to a new series about faith.
The exhibition brings together known groups like the "Kitchen Table Series" (1990) and "Family Pictures and Stories" (1978–1984). Those early photographs use private rooms and everyday objects to look closely at motherhood, gender and identity. A picture titled "Welcome Home" shows relatives rushing toward the camera; small scenes at the kitchen table feel like quiet dramas.
The retrospective was developed with Aperture in New York and first shown in Turin in 2025. Boaz Levin adapted the project for C/O Berlin; the original curation is by Sarah Hermanson Meister (Aperture), according to the show materials.
New work sits alongside the older images. The recent "Preach" series (2024) — nearly forty photographs — focuses on Black congregations and spiritual life. In the audio guide, Weems discusses her interest in differences in religious practice within Black communities and between those practices and Roman Catholic ritual, as reported by tipBerlin.
Why it matters here: Weems’s pictures map personal histories onto wider histories of Black life in the United States. For a Berlin audience, the show offers close, photographic listening. It resists easy spectacle and asks viewers to spend time in rooms, churches and family frames where belonging and pain sit together.
Curatorial context and credits are drawn from the tipBerlin coverage of the exhibition (10 September 2026).
