From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, Carrie Mae Weems (1995–1996) (EMPIRE LINES x Barbican)

Curator Florence Ostende visualises how violence against African Americans has been perpetuated throughout history, and challenged with contemporary art, by developing Carrie Mae Weems’ radical photographic practice from the 1980s to now, and how she reframes whiteness, and ‘Anglo-America’, in relation to Black subjects.

Carrie Mae Weems is one of the most influential contemporary US artists, and interest in her films, installations, and performance artworks is rising in Europe too. From her first UK exhibition with Autograph, founded in Brixton to support Black photographers, Weems returns to London with her largest UK exhibition to date, spanning three decades of her multidisciplinary practice, and over 300 years of American history.

Curator Florence Ostende talks about how her ‘direct intervention’ in daguerreotypes taken from the Harvard Museum archives - with colour, tints, and text - challenges their use in perpetuating systemic racism, inequality, and violence, whilst blurring the boundaries between past and present to reveal how colonial stereotypes still linger today. Alongside these ‘appropriated photographs’, she details the artist as art historian - and her bid to expose the Black Abstract Expressionist painters hidden in plain sight. Beyond her iconic Kitchen Table (1990) series, we see Weems’ political activism, with works addressing women’s position in domestic spaces and Marxism, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and the murder of George Floyd. Ostende reveals why Weems literally puts the muse in Museums, the complex relationship between artist and institution, and what it was like to work with the artist - and ‘win over’ the Barbican’s brutalist architecture.

Carrie Mae Weems: Reflections for Now runs at the Barbican in London until 3 September 2023.

For more, you can read my article in ⁠Shade Art Review: shadepodcast.substack.com/p/jelena-sofronijevic-revisits-carrie

For more about Autograph, hear artist Ingrid Pollard’s EMPIRE LINES on ⁠Carbon Slowly Turning (2022)⁠: ⁠https://pod.link/1533637675/episode/e00996c8caff991ad6da78b4d73da7e4Part of EMPIRE LINES Photography Season, exposing different perspectives on the past. Listen to the other episodes on Contemporary African Photography at Tate Modern, Nil Yalter’s Exile is a Hard Job, plus Gregor Sailer’s series, The Polar Silk Road.

WITH: Florence Ostende, Curator at the Barbican Art Gallery, London. She is the co-curator of Carrie Mae Weems: Reflections for Now.

ART: ‘From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, Carrie Mae Weems (1995–1996)’.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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