C/O Berlin

Culture:

9 September 2026

Culture:

C/O Berlin

9 September 2026

Q: The new exhibition, Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter, has already traveled to Turin, Antwerp, and The Hague before arriving here. What does “adapting” a touring exhibition involve in practice? Where do you have room to make it your own, and where do you stay close to Sarah Hermanson Meister’s original vision?

A: Whenever we exhibit a traveling exhibition, we adapt it to our space and to the way in which we present exhibitions at C/O Berlin. Every space is different, but the Amerika Haus, though not huge, has the benefit of allowing us to show a large amount of work without it becoming too overwhelming. The space in Turin was quite a bit larger, which meant we couldn’t include all the works, but I feel that this often brings out the best in exhibitions, since it encourages us to focus on their essence. I was in regular contact with Sarah, and we exchanged ideas about how best to adapt the exhibition’s narrative to this space.

In this case, the heart of The Heart of the Matter is Preach, a new work by Weems, shown for the first time as part of this exhibition. The work deals with the role of faith and the church in the African American community. Throughout the exhibition, as in the rest of her work, the personal is political, and the self is viewed as a mutable and ever-changing social construct. Since texts and literature play such an important role in her work, for C/O Berlin we added a small display of twelve of Carrie’s favorite books, which visitors are invited to read.

Q: If you had to pick three works from the show that matter most to you personally, which would they be and why?

A: Kitchen Table Series, for the way it plays with the combination of text and image, fiction and documentation. It’s a work that feels literary and incredibly original, and it has left an indelible mark on our cultural landscape.

I also love Family Pictures and Stories. It presages many of the themes that later appeared in Kitchen Table Series—the self as a construct, the interplay of the personal and the political, text and image—but it is one of her earliest works, produced as her MFA graduation project, so it has a certain rawness that I find refreshing and captivating.

Finally, Preach. It’s the heart of the show and presents the range of modes of expression Carrie has used as an artist over the years.

Q: Photographic prints need careful handling: controlled temperature, humidity, specific lighting. What does that side of the process look like for a show this size?

A: It’s a lot of work. Our terrific Loans and Exhibition Manager, Caroline Bollig, will work on producing condition reports and unpacking and repacking the works for about a week before we begin the install.

"It’s the largely invisible labor without which such exhibitions couldn’t take place."

Q: One of the exhibitions you curated at C/O Berlin, Image Ecology, explores the idea that images are embedded in material infrastructures and connected to the systems that produce them. How has this perspective influenced the way you approach curating exhibitions?

A: For me, Weems belongs to a group of artists who have demystified the photographic image and explored it as a site in which power is inscribed—often through mechanisms that remain outside the frame. This has informed my thinking about photography and my work on Image Ecology, since there, too, I was keen on looking at everything that remains “outside the frame” of the way we normally think about and look at images: the waste, labor, and energy that go into producing images but often remain invisible or ignored.

Q: What, to you, separates a good photograph from one that’s actually great?

A: Works of art and culture have to speak to us—to allow us to look at the world slightly differently, to think about it anew, and to question what we thought we knew about it. This applies to photos as well: they can change how we see something, what we know—or think we know—about our surroundings or about ourselves.

Q: What role do you think an institution like C/O Berlin should play today? Should it preserve the photographic canon, or is its role to continually question and redefine it?

A: I see our role as a house for images, photography, and new media, in all their richness. One of the powerful things about photography is that it encompasses so much—from art to photojournalism to “everyday” photography. We all interface with the world around us through photographic images. C/O Berlin offers a space to explore these worlds.

For me, a canon is important not as something frozen in time, but rather as something that is constantly being negotiated, opened, and questioned. We see part of our mission, in that sense, as expanding the canon: challenging its boundaries and shining a light on positions that we feel deserve to be celebrated as part of it. Whether it is VALIE EXPORT, Mary Ellen Mark, Carrie Mae Weems, Dörte Eißfeldt, or Helen Levitt, these are all part of a canon that is growing and defining the work of a new generation of artists.