The Long Goodbye: Carrie Mae Weems Explores the Resilience of Love and Migration at V&A East

The opening of the V&A East Museum brings with it a landmark artistic commission that promises to reshape how we engage with the history of migration in Britain. The Long Goodbye (2026), a major new work by the acclaimed American artist Carrie Mae Weems, stands as the centerpiece of this debut. Developed over an intensive three-year period, the film is a profound exploration of migration, shifting the focus away from cold statistics and political rhetoric toward the intimate, often-obscured love stories that animate the journeys of those who move across borders.

For Weems, love is not merely the subject of the film; it is the methodology itself. By centering the human capacity for affection and connection, she seeks to restore the humanity to individuals whose labor and courage have been foundational to the modern world, yet whose personal histories are frequently erased or reduced to mere data points in official archives. The work challenges viewers to contemplate the love that migrants carry with them across oceans and borders, the love they are forced to leave behind, and the enduring ways these emotional legacies continue to inform the present, even when they remain unacknowledged by the dominant culture.

Migration and the Resonance of Place

Migration has long been a foundational pillar of Carrie Mae Weems’s artistic practice, making her the ideal voice for a commission rooted in the landscape of east London. This area, with its complex history of global movement, serves as a natural backdrop for the themes of the piece. V&A East, in its mission to celebrate and provide a platform for the diverse communities that call this part of London home, has effectively turned the lens of one of the world’s most influential artists toward the UK. While Weems’s work has resonated with generations of British artists for decades, The Long Goodbye marks a significant pivot, as it is her first commission to focus explicitly on the UK and its specific diasporic communities.

The development of the project was dynamic, evolving in real-time as the political landscape in both Britain and the United States became increasingly polarized. As debates and protests surrounding migration intensified, Weems’s initial concepts shifted, responding to the urgency of the moment. The final work serves as an extension of her decades-long commitment to dismantling entrenched hierarchies of power. By scrutinizing how images and archives are utilized to define historical narratives, Weems imagines an alternative account of post-war Britain—one that acknowledges the "buried truths" of why generations immigrated to the UK. In doing so, she provides a pertinent lesson for our current political climate, highlighting how history is often warped or rewritten to serve the agendas of those in power.

The Voices of the Displaced

The visceral power of the film is perhaps most evident in its haunting script, which weaves together the fear of the unknown with the necessity of survival. In one of the film’s most poignant sequences, the words resonate: "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 words, both spoken and sung, place the audience in the shoes of the migrant looking across the vast expanse of the ocean. It captures the dual reality of the migration experience: the fear of an uncertain future and the iron-willed resolve required to leave one’s home. Weems speaks on behalf of a vast spectrum of individuals, from those who immigrated voluntarily to the millions who were forcibly removed in chains. By capturing this anguish, the film gives voice to the unnamed, acknowledging the visceral pain that has shaped our present-day society while pointing to the glaring absence of these personal truths in the historical record.

Intervention and the Archive

Throughout The Long Goodbye, Weems employs her signature use of self-portraiture as a form of artistic and political intervention. By physically inserting herself into the historical narrative and drawing upon her own personal archive, she forces the viewer to confront the gaps in our collective memory. The archive, in Weems’s hands, ceases to be an objective repository of "fact" and becomes a construct that must be interrogated. She challenges the audience to question the assumptions we bring to historical documentation and asks us to consider how a photograph—while serving as evidence of a person’s existence—can fail to reveal anything of their inner life.

This inquiry into the making of history was not confined to the editing room. During the commission’s development, Weems engaged directly with the 2025 cohort of the V&A East Youth Collective. In a series of workshops, she shared her methodology for framing and utilizing archives, inviting the young participants to contribute their own stories. By asking them what they wanted the world to know about their city, their communities, and their origins, Weems empowered these young creators to see themselves as the architects of the next generation of historical narrative.

Water as a Vessel of Memory

Water serves as a central, recurring motif in The Long Goodbye. As a route for migration and a connector between disparate geographies, the ocean functions in the film as a physical and symbolic vessel of history. Weems captures the rhythm and vastness of the waves, using them to evoke the countless stories trapped within the depths. The film honors the memory of the Black bodies lost during the Middle Passage, suggesting a form of historical haunting where the past remains inseparable from the present.

This approach draws upon the concept of "tidalectics," developed by the Barbadian poet and historian Kamau Brathwaite. Rather than viewing history as a linear, teleological progression from the past to the present, tidalectics understands identity and culture through the ebb and flow of the tides—a recurring movement of departure, return, and transformation. In this framework, the ocean is not a barrier that separates the past from the present, but a medium through which ancestral knowledge, memory, and humanity are constantly returned to us.

Toward a Future of Joy and Inevitability

The final movement of The Long Goodbye shifts the tone, opening toward a horizon of joy and possibility. Framed by Weems’s own laughter and the image of a couple dancing, the conclusion suggests that change is both inevitable and unstoppable. This shift is not a dismissal of past violence, but an acknowledgement of the transformative power of love and the endurance of those who move through the world.

In discussions surrounding the film, Weems has noted that "the empire has to deal with the reality of what it has created." The movements of people initiated by the reach of empire are fundamentally altering the social, cultural, and political fabric of nations like Britain and the United States. Weems posits that it is this very migration that serves as the engine for the world’s most significant creative centers. By surrendering to the "waves of history," the film offers a message of hope, insisting that despite a political climate where progress often feels elusive, the forces of change are already firmly in motion.

A Meditative Companion

At the V&A East Museum, The Long Goodbye is exhibited alongside two of Weems’s previous films: Before the Loss of You (2005) and Okwui (2019). Both works serve as vital companions, deepening the themes of love, loss, and legacy. Before the Loss of You provides an intimate look at the relationship between Winnie and Nelson Mandela, focusing on the personal cost of resistance and the depth of love in the face of long-term separation. Okwui, meanwhile, is a tribute to the late Nigerian curator and poet Okwui Enwezor, an influential figure who revolutionized the global art world by challenging the dominance of Western-centric narratives.

Seen in concert, these films reveal that love acts as a central catalyst across the entirety of Weems’s body of work. By reclaiming the humanity of those marginalized by dominant narratives, Weems invites us to reconsider how we inhabit the societies created by their lives. Her work is a persistent call to action: we are asked not merely to question the histories we have inherited, but to actively honor the lives, losses, and loves that continue to forge our collective future. Through her practice, Carrie Mae Weems reminds us that making the unseen visible is, at its core, a profound and necessary act of love.