Carrie Mae Weems appears and disappears among the endless rows of concrete slabs that make up Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial. She’s there and then she isn’t in this short film, traversing past and present in the late winter sunshine, wringing her hands, catching her breath. As she moves out of sight, distant traffic glints brightly at the far end of the row. Later, in two series of photographs, we see her – always from behind in the same long black gown – in the ruins of ancient Rome and also among Mussolini’s fascist architecture. And here she is again, outside the Louvre in Paris and Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao, then in Philadelphia, Dresden and Boston. The figure in the long black gown is Weems playing the role of her own alter ego, her personal muse. She’s an African American witness at large in the world. For all that, Weems is hard to pin down – and the Barbican’s Reflections for Now show traces the complexities of her development.
Weems, who trained as a dancer before embarking on photography and art, often appears as a protagonist in her work. Now 70, she takes photographs, constructs installations and makes films. She also writes – and her words are a constant presence in this, the largest UK show of her work since the 1980s. Her art is rich and full of variety, without wavering from her focus on the Black American experience.
