Is There Hope for Us? 59th Carnegie International Offers a Complex ‘Maybe’

The question about the 59th Carnegie International is not whether there is good art to see. In the Internationals, there always is. This latest edition of North America’s oldest recurring show of global contemporary art—launched in 1896 by Andrew Carnegie, as an annual affair, and lately held once every four years—is, like all recent Internationals, a really big show. Sixty-one artists and collectives are represented, many with multiple pieces. Out of hundreds of works of art, you’re bound to find many that speak to you. 

A more pertinent question is: What can a sampling of worldwide art say about our world? These days that’s a loaded question. In the catalogue for the 59th, Eric Crosby, director of Carnegie Museum of Art, wrote that the museum’s show “unfolds amid profound social violence, political polarization, and technological alienation.” At a time when much of the human race seems to be infected by a toxic mixture of savagery and neglect, Crosby’s words come across as polite euphemisms. 

The director, however, went on to speak wisely. “A museum cannot repair the social fabric,” he wrote. “But it can offer conditions for human presence.” 

And the presence housed here has a distinct focus. The show emphasizes artists from the Global South, as well as from minority or marginalized groups and indigenous peoples. (For example, in printed materials for the exhibition, the bio of a California artist begins: “Miller Robinson is a two-spirited, gender-nonconforming, anti-disciplinary Karuk/Yurok artist.” Which covers a lot of territory, as does Robinson’s art.)

Diversity, equity, and inclusion are on display floridly in the International. Of course this allows the presence of artists from communities that are often ignored or repressed. But there’s more to it. According to Liz Park, one of the show’s three co-curators, a core idea was to make the International truly intercultural. “We were intentionally thinking beyond a very narrow scope of nation-states” when choosing artists, Park said in an interview for Entertainment Central. “More so than national representation, we were interested in what it means for artists to be able to create a space of their own and to reclaim agency and autonomy and self-determination,” she explained.  

Further, the show breaks beyond the rather narrow notion of an artist as a solitary creator. As Park pointed out, many pieces in this International come either from collectives, or from artists teaming with friends and colleagues on a more fluid basis. (The curator calls them “organizers.”) Further still, said Park, the artists often channel “overlapping influences.” Indonesian artist Natasha Tontey makes videos that explore her indigenous Minahasa heritage, yet one of her major influences is John Waters, the filmmaker of Pink Flamingos and Hairspray. 

And the Norwegian artist Hans Ragnar Mathisen—a proud Sámi, known for his advocacy of indigenous peoples everywhere—has a large collaborative piece in the International that includes some of his watercolors. One is a picture of a mountain sacred to the Sámi. Another pays tribute to art that inspired him in his boyhood: Donald Duck comics. “This is what it means to be indigenous today,” Park said, “to hold Donald Duck and the sacred mountain together. So I think about that as part of our larger experience of being contemporary. It’s all of these things, and they’re not necessarily contradictory. We’re all multifaceted beings.” 

The International’s high-diversity, high-overlap approach has benefits for visitors. You get views of the world that you might not find in your social media feed, and definitely wouldn’t find in most of mainstream culture. Just entering the museum from Forbes Avenue (as shown above) lets you know what’s in store.

Sometimes a bit of context is useful to fully grasp what you’re seeing. The video by Natasha Tontey tells a seriocomic coming-of-age story, embedded in ancient myths and rituals of the Minahasa people. It may help to know that in one sequence, the preteen girls are dancing a war dance traditionally performed by men. But maybe you don’t really need the context. Maybe, at least in some cases, one would do better just being immersed in the mysteries.

The thematic title of the 59th International is an incomplete sentence: If the word we. Chosen by the show’s co-curators—Ryan Inouye and Liz Park of the museum staff, and Danielle A. Jackson of Artists Space in New York—it is perhaps best left open-ended. The curators borrowed the phrase from a work by the Egyptian writer Haytham el-Wardany, in which he explores whether it’s possible to find a “we” that transcends “a tribal, loyalist, national, or fanatical we.” Such a we, he writes, is “an identity-based structure, locked in on itself.” Instead, el-Wardany asks: “What if the word we becomes a space for listening?” 

At a visual-art show most listening is done through the eyes. What comes across in If the word we is not a chorus of voices singing in universal harmony, but a richer, more complex synthesis of counterpoints. After all, that’s what the big we consists of. Here are some highlights. 

Monumental Art

In the museum’s Hall of Sculpture, which was built to simulate the inner sanctuary of the Parthenon, a temple to the goddess Athena, Brazilian artist Cinthia Marcelle has installed a temple to democracy. Her “Green Space Annex” was inspired (if that’s the right word) by two ugly events. In January of 2023, Brazil’s National Congress building was vandalized by followers of outgoing president Jair Bolsonaro. Angry that Bolsonaro had lost his bid for re-election, they tried the tactic Donald Trump’s fans had tried in 2021 at the U.S. Capitol. Each time, democratic processes prevailed, and Marcelle’s temple can be seen as upholding hopes for the future. The surrounding green carpet is the shade used when repairing damage at the National Congress. Copies of news reports about the two attacks are embedded in the ceiling of “Green Space Annex,” but they’re hard to read. Simply strolling amid the columns of the edifice, under its sheltering roof, imparts a sense of solidity. 

Videos

Moving pictures were brand new when the first International opened; now they’ve become a staple of the exhibitions. The buzziest practitioner of the form at the current show is the Taiwanese digital-media maker Li Yi-Fan, who this year enjoyed a double success. He’s the featured artist in Taiwan’s pavilion at the Venice Biennale in Italy, while the Carnegie International is screening his 37-minute video, “What Is Your Favorite Primitive.” Li has crossover appeal. Producing work that is cultishly popular among art geeks, computer geeks, and online freaks, he’s been called a “poet of the enshittosphere.” The video at the International stars his signature creations, naked humanoids who investigate and muse upon the significance (or insignificance) of digital artmaking, with side trips into the meaning (or meaningless) of life. Li’s work is perceived to be at once disturbing and amusing. 

But there’s another video not to miss. Intriguingly titled on our way to the general strike, it’s a  feature-length piece by the U.S.-born artist Wu Tsang. A MacArthur genius-grant recipient, she has pursued a long-running obsession with Georges Bizet’s 1875 opera Carmen. The opera’s underlying story, adapted from a French novella, has been re-adapted countless times over the years, and as Tsang once told an interviewer, “There’s so much material [that] Carmen becomes like a prism to look at the world.” Tsang’s video—co-produced with her colleagues in the Moved by the Motion collective—is a breathtaking attempt to do exactly what she said.

Among other things, the video chronicles the history of cinema. Noting that in Bizet’s opera, Carmen first comes onstage among workers leaving a cigarette factory, Tsang and company draw a parallel to the seminal 1895 short film by Louis Lumière, “Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon.” And from there, the video segues for a while into the dystopian world of hyper-mechanized work, in a series of disorienting scenes that might strike art-house film fans as evoking a mood somewhere between Metropolis and Alphaville. Throughout, the images come in mesmerizing cascades of quick takes, many drawn from archival footage and some staged for the occasion. There are dazzling dance scenes and amazing railroad scenes. Carmen’s death—stabbed by a spurned ex-lover—is enacted, reenacted, and re-re-re-renacted. Archival scenes include brief grabs from Orson Welles’s F for Fake, Chaplin’s Modern Times, the 1954 adaptation of Carmen titled Carmen Jones (with Dorothy Dandridge and Harry Belafonte), the “El Macho” scene from Dušan Makavejev’s Sweet Movie—the list could go on and on. 

Wu Tsang’s on our way to the general strike plays continuously on a huge screen in the museum’s Hall of Architecture, flanked by towering replicas of the facades of medieval cathedrals. A question the video poses in voice-under narration is: “How do you get a figure that stands in for both the commune and the individuated interiority?” Don’t be surprised if the answer is Carmen. 

An African Saga

Non-moving pictures tell stories, too. Spread across a large area of the Heinz Galleries is an intriguing collection of historical items put together by the artist Georges Adéagbo of Benin. The assembly includes found objects such as posters, books, and souvenirs, plus commissioned artworks. Notable among the latter are portraits of the first presidents or leaders of African countries liberated from colonial rule during the mid-to-later 1900s: Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, Julius Nyerere in Tanzania, and others. Since the newly freed nations tended to adopt distinctly African (but non-Marxist) forms of socialist government, Adéagbo has called the exhibit “La Socialisme Africain.” First shown in  2001 as part of a major traveling exhibition, it’s now updated for the International. 

Adéagbo was at the press opening and I spoke with him a bit. He handed me his business card, which identifies him as president, Benin bureau, of Kulturforum Sud Nord (South North). Through an interpreter—he’s most comfortable in French—he explained that the usual order we hear is “North-South,” but he sees things working the other way around: 

A Modern Master 

Another multi-piece exhibit honors the late artist Sofu Teshigahara (1900 – 1979). He’s known as the man who reinvented ikebana, by breaking away from traditions that had defined the Japanese art of flower arranging. Although the show can’t display flowers arranged by a man long dead, Teshigahara also worked in other media, and a selection of his paintings and sculptures are shown here for the first time outside Japan. To call the pieces memorable would be putting it mildly. 

The massive, yet airy sculpture “Yakumo (Eightfold Clouds),” made from a large camphor tree that was uprooted in a typhoon, is typhoon-like in its own right; it resembles a fierce embodiment of the life-force blooming. A smaller, spookier sculpture looks like Munch’s “The Scream” rendered abstractly in wood. And the painted standing screen “Green Bamboo (Stone)” is a splashy marvel. 

Teshigahara’s legacy has spread globally through his founding of the Sogestu school of ikebana. The pieces at the International were brought to Pittsburgh via the Sogetsu Foundation. And some contemporary Sogetsu ikebana has arrived as well. In the Museum of Art’s upstairs lobby, two stupendous new works designed by Kenjiro Katayama were assembled with help from the Pittsburgh Sogetsu Study Group. Decorated with dried flowers, their superstructures were made by looping and intertwining long strips of bamboo stalk into abstractions the size of SUVs. 

The Truth About Reality

Canadian/Mohawk artist Walter Scott has scored a hit in the art world with his Wendy comics. The title character of the satirical cartoon series is herself a millennial-age artist, ever striving for creative breakthroughs and recognition … while at the same time relentlessly chasing sex, drugs, and an attractive rock ‘n roll drummer. In other words Wendy is a human on a quest for total 21st-century self-fulfillment, a quality that should make her relatable. She visits the International in an installation mounted behind wrap-around glass in an alcove. A wiped-out Wendy lies exhausted in the background, and the title of the piece is emblazoned in a long sequence spanning the length of the alcove. The title: “Reality Has Less to Do with Me Than I Thought.” 

A Hypnotic Room

Jasleen Kaur is a Scottish-Indian artist descended from Sikh immigrants to Glasgow. In 2024 she won the Tate Britain’s annual Turner Prize, given for disruptively innovative art. Her installation at the International, titled “Supra,” casts a powerful spell subtly.  You enter a long, narrow room that has white walls with red carpeting, and is otherwise nearly bare. Two pebbled glass windows are set into one wall. A light that simulates sunlight slants in through the windows, casting textured patterns on the carpet. The light slowly moves, fades to darkness, and re-dawns, while strains of a sinuous jazz tune play softly. The effect is entrancing. And it’s deepened by a bizarre further touch.  

On a windowsill sit two small objects. One is a glass model of the Babri Masjid, a historic mosque in India that was demolished by Hindu radicals, setting off deadly riots. At times, the little glass mosque flickers and glows, drawing attention to the small object next to it, which appears to be a set of solid gold dentures. It is in fact a gold-plated cast of the artist’s teeth. 

According to the text panel at the room’s entrance, each object represents “an attempt at reconciliation and historical correction.” If that is the message, this reviewer sure didn’t get it. I prefer to look at art without reading text panels. At the International, I snapped photos of the texts to read them later on my phone—and until then, I didn’t know what the glass object was a model of, nor its significance. But here is a case that proves a larger point. When art is good, you don’t need an interpretive guide or an artist’s statement to appreciate it. The work speaks for itself, in its own language(s). What it says to a particular viewer might convey the emotions that the artist intended, but with different meanings attached. Or vice versa. I can say only that Kaur’s “Supra” spoke to me on an atavistic level, inviting contemplation. I recommend spending quiet time in the room. 

Visitor Information

The main body of the 59th Carnegie International is on view through January 3, 2027 at Carnegie Museum of Art, 4400 Forbes Ave., Oakland. The museum is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily and until 8 p.m. on Thursdays through Labor Day. After that it’s closed on Tuesdays and major holidays. See the museum’s website for further details. 

Given the size of the show, you’d be taking on quite a task if you try to see all of it at once. A handful of shorter repeat visits will yield the best experience. Pittsburgh-area residents and frequent guests may save money by buying a museum membership, good for one year of unlimited free admissions. 

Also, portions of the International are mounted at other locations in Pittsburgh:  the Kamin Science Center, the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, and most extensively in the galleries of the Mattress Factory; all on the city’s North Side. 

Finally, for those who’d like to dive into art theory and the thinking behind the 59th International, the Exhibition Catalogue is on sale in the Museum of Art gift shop for $65. The 466-page book contains statements from the curators, transcripts of interviews with artists and “thought partners,” reproductions of artists’ work, and assorted texts—including the Haytham el-Wardany essay that yielded “If the word we.”

Photos are by Zachary Riggleman, except for the outdoor entrance photo and the Kulturforum close-up, which are by the reviewer. 

Mike Vargo, an independent writer and editor based in Pittsburgh, writes about visual arts and theater for Entertainment Central. 

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