Carrie Mae Weems

For more than four decades, Carrie Mae Weems has positioned herself at the threshold between image and history – reshaping the possibilities of photography, installation, video and performance. This April, she makes her debut with Goodman Gallery London, presenting an exhibition that brings together recent and significant bodies of work reflecting on migration, belonging and the enduring afterlives of the Atlantic passage. Concurrently, Weems is presenting 'The Long Goodbye', a newly commissioned film for the launch of V&A East, on view until 18 October 2026.

Her practice moves fluidly between aesthetic innovation and political inquiry, positioning the artist as both a witness and a participant in the unfolding of history. Weems has a long-standing presence within London’s institutional landscape. Her major survey Reflections for Now was presented at the Barbican Art Centre in 2023, following earlier exhibitions at Café Gallery Projects curated by Dr Mark Sealy in 2005. Her debut with Goodman Gallery London marks a significant new chapter in her sustained engagement with the city. This new exhibition premieres recent and iconic bodies of work responding to themes of migration, identity and belonging.

Among the central works in the exhibition is Seaside, a five-panel photographic work in which Weems reprises her iconic strategy of self-portraiture as witness. Photographed from behind on a shingle beach, the artist appears in moments of quiet reverie facing the ocean’s horizon. Seated at a desk, she attempts to render the vast and unknowable scale of the Atlantic passage. Across the sequence – seated, standing, and ultimately unable to contain the immensity before her – pages from her sketchbook are caught by gusts of wind, underscoring the limits of representation when confronted with histories of displacement and trauma.