Renowned American artist Carrie Mae Weems has unveiled her latest major work, The Long Goodbye (2026), a profound multimedia film commissioned specially for the grand opening of the V&A East Museum. Developed painstakingly over nearly three years, the piece examines the complex and often painful realities of migration through the lens of human connection, focusing particularly on the obscured love stories intertwined within these arduous journeys. By positioning love as both the subject of her work and its primary methodological tool, Weems seeks to restore fundamental humanity to populations whose courage, resilience, and labor have fundamentally shaped the modern world, yet whose individual lives are frequently reduced to cold statistics or entirely omitted from mainstream historical accounts.
The new museum commission asks viewers to recognize the intangible emotional weight that people carry with them when they migrate from one homeland to another. Beyond that, it illuminates the profound love that migrants leave behind, demonstrating how these enduring experiences continue to inform and shape our present era, even when they remain unacknowledged by institutional powers. Migration has long been deeply rooted in Weems’s conceptual and artistic practice, but the theme carries an especially intense resonance in east London, an area where historic and contemporary migration has continuously defined both its cultural past and its vibrant present. Celebrating, honoring, and actively creating space for the diverse communities that call east London home sits at the very heart of the mission of the V&A East Museum.
This landmark commission represents a notable shift, turning Weems’s critical lens toward the United Kingdom and its diasporic communities for the first time. For decades, her trailblazing work has been deeply admired by and profoundly influential upon successive generations of British artists. As the commission developed over the past three years, Weems’s initial concepts evolved organically in response to the intense debates, social movements, and political protests regarding migration that have dominated the contemporary political climate in both Great Britain and the United States. The Long Goodbye serves as a continuation of Weems’s multi-decade commitment to dismantling entrenched hierarchies of power. She achieves this by rigorously examining how photographic images and official archives construct, preserve, and often distort dominant historical narratives.
Through the medium of film, Weems imagines an alternative account of post-war Britain—one that openly acknowledges the buried truths concerning how and why generations of people immigrated to the United Kingdom. This message serves as a deeply pertinent lesson in the current political moment, highlighting how history has frequently become warped, sanitized, and rewritten to serve the self-serving agendas of those holding systemic power.
Voices of the Voyage and the Burden of Empire
The emotional core of the film is carried by evocative vocal performances that place the viewer directly into the psychological landscape of the migrant experience. Spoken and sung passages from the work echo with profound vulnerability:
“I’m trembling. I’m trembling… tell me what’s on the other side… I remember when Britain was smashed and burned and when we became a part of the Commonwealth and when the Queen called saying that she needed us… I remember the great extraction of natural resources and wealth needed at the service of empire.”
These powerful words evoke the visceral fear of the unknown, effectively placing the audience in the precarious position of an individual looking across a vast, unforgiving ocean toward an entirely uncertain future, yet somehow summoning the necessary resolve and courage to leave everything behind. Weems speaks not only on behalf of those who undertook voluntary immigration in search of a better life, but also channels the unmitigated terror experienced by millions of individuals who were forced to emigrate in chains. Her voice captures the raw, physicalized pain and generational anguish of these unnamed people, whose suffering underpins our modern reality yet whose basic humanity is so rarely recorded in the official archives of history.
Intervention, Archives, and Community Collaboration
Weems’s longstanding artistic strategy of utilizing self-portraiture as a direct act of political and cultural intervention runs continuously throughout the film, alongside direct references to her own personal archive. By intentionally inserting her own image into the historical narrative, Weems uses her physical body and voice to draw sharp, uncompromising attention to individuals whose lived experiences have been systematically silenced, marginalized, or forgotten by society. Under her direction, the institutional archive ceases to be viewed as an objective repository of unassailable facts. Instead, it transforms into material that viewers must actively question, forcing them to confront the hidden assumptions and biases they bring to historical interpretation.
This critical inquiry extends to the very mechanics of looking—how a photograph can function simultaneously as cold evidence of a human presence while revealing almost nothing about that person’s rich inner life. Weems carefully draws attention to this critical gap, prompting audiences to consider what an image preserves, what it deliberately leaves to the imagination, and how contemporary society might actively work to fill in those historical fissures.
This meticulous attention to how history is constructed also heavily influenced the developmental phases of the museum commission. During a series of intensive workshops with the 2025 cohort of the V&A East Youth Collective, Weems shared insights into how she frames, curates, and utilizes her personal archive. In response, members of the youth cohort shared powerful stories drawn from their own family histories and community archives. These contributions were shaped in direct answer to probing questions posed by Weems regarding what they would most want outsiders to know about their city, their specific communities, and their places of origin.
The Ocean as a Vessel of History and Tidalectics
Water plays a central, symbolic role throughout the film, acting simultaneously as the physical route of migration, a literal and figurative connector between disparate geographies and cultures, and an enduring vessel of collective history. Numerous cinematic shots focus intently on the open ocean and the relentless rise and fall of its waves, evoking both the natural rhythm and terrifying vastness of the sea, as well as the countless untold lives and stories trapped permanently within its endless depths.
These evocative passages invoke the immeasurable number of Black bodies lost during the Middle Passage of the transatlantic slave trade, while underscoring their enduring spiritual power to rise again and confront the modern present that was built directly upon their stolen lives and exploited labor. The film powerfully suggests that the traumatic histories of migration across the Atlantic remain forever inseparable from contemporary global realities.
Furthermore, Weems’s striking imagery invokes the concept of tidalectics, a theoretical framework developed by the renowned Barbadian poet and historian Kamau Brathwaite. Tidalectics offers a way of understanding history, culture, and identity not through a straightforward, linear progression from past to present, but rather through the natural ebb and flow of the tides as recurring movements of departure, return, and transformation, accompanied by the perpetual presence of ancestral knowledge. Through this lens, The Long Goodbye reinterprets the ocean not merely as a watery grave or a barrier, but as a dynamic vessel through which the humanity, memories, and enduring love of anonymous individuals are never truly lost, but instead continually return to inform and reshape the present day.
The Inevitability of Change and the Power of Joy
The final section of the film shifts toward a profound sense of joy and boundless possibility for the future. Framed by the sound of Weems’s own laughter and imagery of a couple dancing, this concluding movement embraces the inevitability of social and cultural transformation—a change set in motion both because of and in spite of violent historical trajectories, driven forward fundamentally by love.
Discussing The Long Goodbye in a later interview, Weems remarked that "the empire has to deal with the reality of what it has created," highlighting how the historical movements of people initially set in motion by imperial expansion will continue to fundamentally transform Great Britain, the United States, and numerous other major nations across the globe. Weems powerfully reminds audiences that this continuous wave of human migration is the very foundation that underpins the world’s greatest creative centers, from London to New York and beyond.
Her artistic statements cultivate a deep feeling of the inevitability of change, encouraging viewers to surrender to the powerful waves of history and place their trust in that transformative process. The film’s repeated, confident insistence that profound change is already actively taking place offers much-needed hope within a contemporary political climate where social progress frequently feels frustratingly elusive, despite the tireless efforts of those fighting for justice. Change is going to come; change is already occurring.
Contextualizing Love and Resistance within the V&A East Museum
The Long Goodbye is currently being exhibited at the V&A East Museum alongside two seminal archival films by Weems: Before the Loss of You (2005) and Okwui (2019). Like her newest commission, both of these companion pieces serve as deep meditations on the multifaceted nature of love.
Before the Loss of You honors the profound romantic and political bond shared between Winnie and Nelson Mandela, imagining their intimate relationship prior to the heavy personal sacrifices demanded by their lifelong fight against apartheid, and prior to Mandela’s grueling 27-year imprisonment. The piece reflects deeply on love, painful separation, and the immense personal cost exacted by political resistance.
Meanwhile, Okwui pays a moving homage to Okwui Enwezor, the visionary Nigerian curator, art critic, and poet who is widely regarded as one of the most influential cultural figures of his generation. Enwezor fundamentally advanced a global perspective on art, consistently challenging the entrenched dominance of Western narratives in the global art market. Created in commemoration following his death in 2019, Weems’s film stands as a personal and public tribute to his extraordinary life and his lasting impact on how modern and contemporary art is understood, studied, and presented today—a philosophical ethos reflected directly in the V&A East Museum’s ongoing installations, including the Why We Make Galleries exhibition.
Seen together, these interconnected films reveal love as the primary, driving catalyst behind virtually the entirety of Weems’s celebrated artistic oeuvre. By sharing layered, multimedia stories that demand we recognize love within the lives of strangers across vast expanses of time and geography, Weems bridges historical divides. Recovering the full humanity of individuals who have been marginalized within dominant cultural narratives fundamentally alters how we live within the very societies their lives helped to build.
Ultimately, Carrie Mae Weems asks her audiences not only to critically question the historical stories they have inherited, but to truly honor the lives, the losses, and the loves through which our modern world continues to be forged. Her lifelong artistic practice has consistently remained dedicated to making visible those who have been rendered unseen—an endeavor that, in itself, constitutes a profound act of love.