With a career spanning more than 35 years, Carrie Mae Weems has investigate family relationships, racial and cultural identities, sexism, class, political systems, and the consequences and disparities of power. Determined as ever to enter the picture — both literally and metaphorically — Weems has sustained an ongoing dialogue within contemporary discourse, investigating what she, in a nod to the Black American poet and scholar, Amiri Baraka, calls “the changing same”.

During this time, Carrie Mae Weems has developed a complex body of work employing photographs, text, fabric, audio, digital images, installation, and video. Her work shifts between interrogating found images, and generating new staged photography and film. The content of her ongoing project is to understand, to tease out of the image, the conditions of living. Her work provokes a double bind between the viewer and the subject, often with uncomfortable and disquieting results. The Shape of Things encompasses and reveals consistent themes and methods harnessed in Weems’s larger body of work.

With cinematic and special effect techniques drawn from earlier times, such as dioramas, side-shows, and a Pepper’s Ghost, The Shape of Things is an incisive, powerfully emotional and critical reflection on subjects both deeply embedded in American culture and history and the explosive events of recent years. This monumental series of installations continues LUMA Arles’s commitment to producing complex exhibitions by today’s most compelling artists. Initiated by the Park Avenue Armory in New York City in 2021, The Shape of Things takes a new and expanded form in LUMA Arles. While much of the work is set within the United States, it is easy to see comparisons with the political and social realities and disruptions of Europe and beyond. Weems seems to suggest most poignantly that we cannot rise to the challenges of our times without confronting the realities of our past.