CARMEN WINANT | TOGETHERING

- Carmen Winant, Togethering 1, 2020
Carmen Winant's expanded photographic practice incorporates found images to create large scale collages, sculptures, artist books and installations that question the representation of women in contemporary society. The artist's feminist research-based practice employs craft techniques, repetition and unexpected correlations to probe notions of embodiment, feminine power, intimacy, mundanity, and corporeality.

A Guggenheim fellow in photography, Winant has exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney, Photo Elysée, Aperture Foundation, FOMU Antwerp, The Museum of Contemporary Photography, ICA Boston, Sculpture Center and many others. Her numerous artist books have won awards including the 2024 Author Book Award at the Rencontres d'Arles Book Awards.

Winant's work is held in major collections including The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico city and others.
- Carmen Winant, Togethering 6, 2020
This body of work began before the pandemic. I had no idea that the ground that held it together — togetherness, bodies physically touching other bodies — would shift beneath us. As the isolation set in, I continued to collect material and attend to the studio every day, listening to the news as I cut image after image and drew for the first time in many years. At the heart of everything is the promise of communion: the merging of multiple bodies into one body. I am a secular, atheistic Jew for whom that word, and its ritual, takes shape outside of religiosity. Communion is unfolded here for its spiritual, sensual and political capabilities (realms that have always intermingled), unfolding: how do we find affinity? How — the work of aliveness — do we consume each other? And how to make art about physical contact in a world that disallows it?
At its outset, this was a way of memorizing physical closeness in all of its forms. Then the ground shifted again: thousands of bodies began to move together — to become one body, as with any fortified political movement— across the streets of America and our world protesting the poison of white supremacy. Its communion surprised me but shouldn’t have: togetherness is never apolitical, never unhitched from power and self realization, never without agitation and joy.
- Carmen Winant, Togethering 3, 2020
The works' shape and framing is derived from mandala designs recovered from books of feminism, healing, and New Age. The spontaneous, diagrammatic forms are meant to represent an entire cosmos, made up of infinite constituencies: a cosmic model for wholeness through interwoven, and often parallel, parts.

- Carmen Winant
Recent Exhibitions and News
Learn More About the Artist

Artists
CARMEN WINANT