Carrie Mae Weems: A Great Turn in the Possible at KBr Fundación MAPFRE Photography Center

October 6, 2022–January 15, 2023

From the start of her work, artist Carrie Mae Weems has been fascinated with a variety of imagery, ideas, clichés, and issues. A fantastic turn in the future sketches out a look back over four decades of a trajectory that has proven both necessary and visionary at the same time.

Weems has continually observed ordinary occurrences since the beginning of her career and given the group that has previously been denied them visual representation and agency. Weems’s work has consistently engaged in an exercise of commemoration, from the reappropriation of daguerreotypes and photographs that sought to justify and perpetuate the imposition of certain imaginaries onto forms of black subjectivity to the contemporary narration of the quotidian, photographing her friends and relatives as she reimagined new models to live by. One that shows up in her desire to take control of one’s own story and build a paradigm that is free of the racial prejudices that are so deeply ingrained in the sociopolitical psyche and imagination of the United States.

Weems has made a conscious choice to concentrate on black subjecthood throughout her career, and she works hard to advance this goal well beyond any ambition to create an essentialist politics of representation. Weems’s practice has been and continues to be defined by subverting popular memorabilia and reinventing “the everyday” as folklore in order to dispel overly prevalent mythologies about the black community in the US and elsewhere, historically and currently, but more importantly, by understanding such an exercise as a necessary step in the formulation of a new humanism.

A Great Turn in the Possible follows Weems’ muses as they perform and reenact life itself, occupy public space, challenge history and its scenarios, and embrace the future and its conditions of possibility. The artist is attempting to create a space for a new socio-political and cultural conversation by praising the efforts of the forerunners, paving the way for the successors, and most importantly, striving for a collective reimagining of a shared future.

The Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart and Fundación MAPFRE collaborated to organize the exhibition Carrie Mae Weems: A Great Turn in the Possible, which follows a chronological and thematic journey through series of work, some of which may be seen at the location of Fundació Foto Colectania.