{"id":1933399,"date":"2026-05-12T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-12T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1933399"},"modified":"2026-05-12T09:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-05-12T06:00:00","slug":"carnegie-international-2026-review-a-powerful-show-about-solidarity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1933399","title":{"rendered":"Carnegie International 2026, Review: A Powerful Show About Solidarity"},"content":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/2026-04-27_CI59_Exhibition_Installation-17-Web-3000px.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n

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\n\tBy my count, there are at least three flying people included in Pittsburgh\u2019s recently opened Carnegie International. One can be found in Khalil Rabah\u2019s video Critical Interrogations: Renewed Belief<\/em> (1997), in which one man is launched by another over an olive tree, a symbol of resilience in the artist\u2019s native Palestine. Another can be found\u2014sort of\u2014in Shala Miller\u2019s video installation Flight<\/em> (2026), a murky abstraction projected onto sinuous screens hung from the ceiling. That video is inspired by Toni Morrison\u2019s novel Song of Solomon<\/em>, whose titular character is an enslaved man who flew back to Africa.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe third flying person appears in archival footage projected during Be Holding<\/em>, a performance Brooke O\u2019Harra conceived with the poet Ross Gay, the composer Tyshawn Sorey, and the musical quartet Yarn\/Wire. Staged at a YMCA gym during the exhibition\u2019s opening weekend, the performance centered on a 1976 baseline scoop by Julius Erving, who appeared to defy gravity when he leapt above his opponents\u2019 heads and rammed a basketball through a hoop in mid-air. Be Holding<\/em> starred grown men and adolescents who danced and spoke their way toward understanding Erving\u2019s feat. Eventually, the performers came to realize that Dr. J\u2019s dunk was less the result of one person\u2019s might than the product of good old teamwork\u2014\u201cholding each other, which is a practice,\u201d as the performers at one point repeated.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt takes a lot to soar, and we cannot do it alone. That is the message to be gained from this year\u2019s lush and quietly astonishing edition of the Carnegie International, a recurring exhibition run by the Carnegie Museum of Art that is almost as old as the Venice Biennale. As if to underscore the communal nature of the endeavor, the curators\u2014Ryan Inouye and Liz Park, of the Carnegie Museum, and Danielle A. Jackson, of New York\u2019s Artists Space\u2014included the first-person plural in their exhibition title, \u201cIf the word we,\u201d a quotation from a Haytham el-Wardany essay about the impossibility of \u201cbeing individual without being collective at the same time,\u201d as the writer put it.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe 61 artists in the show run the gamut from a Filipino online radio station to a Japanese ikebana foundation, though most participants are artists with traditional studio practices. (Roughly half are based outside the US and Europe, reflecting a demographical shift that began with last edition, in 2022. The Carnegie International prior to that, in 2018, wasn\u2019t really so international: just a quarter of its artists worked in locales beyond the US and Europe, which is more than could be said of many Carnegie Internationals before that one.) Even though most of the artists in the show work solo, many have found creative ways of dissolving their individual authorship.<\/p>\n

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Photorealistic paintings of hands held across chests figure in a section of the Carnegie International devoted to Khalil Rabah\u2019s work.<\/span>\u00a9Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh\/Photo Zachary Riggleman<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tNear the museum\u2019s entrance, a trio of S\u00e1mi artists\u2014Hans Ragnar Mathisen, Joar Nango, and Elle M\u00e1rj\u00e1 Eira\u2014banded together for a presentation that begins in the lobby and spills outside into a courtyard. Their installation, titled Buolvvaiguin (With Generations)<\/em>, revolves around the life story of Mathisen, whose watercolors depict the artists\u2019 shared homeland of S\u00e1pmi, a land under siege from developers in Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. Mathisen\u2019s paintings are draped over structures created by Nango, whose arcing wood elements mirror those seen in S\u00e1mi fishing villages, and a film by Eira in which Mathisen plays the S\u00e1mi anthem on the piano.<\/p>\n

\n\tAt the Mattress Factory, one of three other venues beyond the Carnegie Museum, an entire three-story building is given over to the married Peruvian artists Claudia Martinez Garay and Arturo Kameya, whose sprawling installation La ceniza ya no recuerda qu\u00e9 caus\u00f3 el incendio. \/ The ash no longer remembers what caused the fire.<\/em>, dated 2026, includes greyish paintings, textiles showing people breaking free from chains, a room filled mostly with rubble, a jerky machine, and altar-like niches with barred windows. It\u2019s not possible to tell which elements were contributed by Garay and which were lent by Kameya, and this gripping piece impresses less for its ability to unfurl a story\u2014it ostensibly tells the tale of T\u00fapac Amaru II, an Indigenous leader who led a rebellion against Spanish colonizers in Peru, though the events are too hard to follow\u2014than for its maximalist mind meld.<\/p>\n

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At the Mattress Factory, Claudia Martinez Garay and Artur Kameya joined forces for an installation so sprawling that it\u2019s tough to tell who contributed which elements.<\/span>\u00a9Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh\/Photo Zachary Riggleman<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tWork of this kind is about collectivity as a means of fighting the man\u2014an especially relevant topic as any during continued conflicts in Palestine, Iran, Ukraine, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, all of which haunt the Carnegie International. But the curators also show, if only somewhat convincingly, that this kind of community-led defiance is not a new artistic tradition.<\/p>\n

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Firman Ichsan, an Indonesian fashion photographer, is the subject of a historical mini-presentation at the Carnegie. Depicted here is the model Okky Asokawaty.<\/span>Photo Firman Ichsan<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tAlongside a host of new commissions, the show includes several mini-exhibitions of historical artists with an anti-authoritarian streak. One focuses on the fashion photographer Firman Ichsan, whose studio became a gathering place for chicly dressed Indonesians in the 1970s during the time of the Suharto dictatorship. But these presentations lapse into academicism, with an eat-your-veggies approach to un-canonized areas of art history that conflicts with the ultra-current sensibility of the rest of the show. (And besides, why not just give these artists proper retrospectives outside the Carnegie International?)<\/p>\n

\n\tMore successful are displays of other artists\u2019 artworks organized by contemporary artists. G. Peter Jemison, a member of the Heron Clan of the Seneca Nation, returned to a survey of Native American artists of the Haudenosaunee confederacy that he curated in 1975 and revised it anew, presenting works by Jay Carrier, Tom Huff, himself, and others in a fresh setting. (Back then, Jemison transported the show\u2019s contents using a van in 1975; he pays homage to that mode of transport with a newly purchased Chevrolet that will remain parked outside the Carnegie through the end of the exhibition\u2019s run in January.) Meanwhile, Karuk\/Yurok artist Miller Robinson pulled baskets from Indigenous communities out of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History\u2019s storage and arranged them in vitrines, adding to them little butterflies and plastic hearts.<\/p>\n

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Georges Ad\u00e9agbo\u2019s Le Socialisme Africaine<\/em> (2001\u20134) is newly revisited for the Carnegie, with a new Pittsburgh-specific focus.<\/span>\u00a9Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh\/Photo Zachary Riggleman<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tElsewhere in the museum, Beninois artist Georges Ad\u00e9agbo revisited his remarkable 2001 installation Le Socialisme Africain<\/em>, which he initially created for a survey of African contemporary art organized by Okwui Enwezor. Cascading across a full gallery of its own, the installation contains T-shirts, posters, masks, posters, books, vinyl records, carpets, and more, all of them bearing some connection to decolonization in Africa. There are also some new additions that have a Pittsburgh-specific context. In between an image of enslaved people being marched through a field and a picture of Fran\u00e7ois Tombalbaye, the Chadian president who liberated his nation from French rule in the 1960s, I spotted a sign for the United Steelworkers, a union headquartered in Pittsburgh. In bold blue letters, the sign spells out a rousing word that rang through my mind throughout this exhibition: \u201cSOLIDARITY.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Hong Lee Hyunsook made her 35-foot-tall frottage What You\u2019re Touching Now\u2014Insubong in 2025<\/em> by ascending a mountain in South Korea.<\/span>Courtesy the artist<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

It takes a lot to soar,<\/strong> and we cannot do it alone. This is also the message of Hong Lee Hyunsook\u2019s What You\u2019re Touching Now\u2014Insubong in 2025<\/em> (2025), whose title refers to the mountain the Korean artist scaled to create this frottage. To do so, she donned a harness, then ascended high off the ground. Suspended over the park below, she attached a 35-foot-long stretch of gwangmok<\/em> fabric to the peak and methodically ran a crayon along the mountain\u2019s rough surface, an act only possible because there were other climbers there to help her.<\/p>\n

\n\tSpeckled with pops of black and crimson, Hong Lee\u2019s frottage is hung near the parking lot, making it one of the first things many viewers will see in the Carnegie International. It\u2019s a smart curatorial choice, since this edition posits that abstraction is undergoing a worldwide renaissance, continuing an emphasis also found in the show\u2019s 2022 edition.<\/p>\n

\n\tAbstraction is a mode of art-making that can be a stumbling block for biennial curators, who often can\u2019t quite figure out what to do with it. But at this Carnegie International, abstraction fits right in. Here, it\u2019s not the sort of artmaking practiced by lone, tortured geniuses in their studio. Instead, it\u2019s an understated kind of art that needs other people to come to fruition.<\/p>\n

\n\tThis type of abstraction is exemplified by the painter Zhao Yao, whose works are composed of the shells of eggs that he purchases online from across China. Unlike spare paintings of the postwar era created by artists like Agnes Martin, who famously worked solo, Zhao\u2019s require assistance from supply chains and shipping companies to become complete. In a different way, RJ Messineo\u2019s abstractions are also about networks, since they also foreground connective forces. Messineo\u2019s paintings are technically groupings of little canvases, only some of which are brightly hued monochromes; these mini-pictures are held together through magnets attached to wood boards behind them. Arranged like misaligned Tetris pieces, Messineo\u2019s paintings look as though they might fall apart if one were to remove any of their disparate elements.<\/p>\n

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Zhao Yao\u2019s abstractions are made by rigorously lining up eggshells in rows.<\/span>\u00a9Zhao Yao\/Photo Zhang Hong\/Courtesy Ota Fine Arts<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tIn the case of Sil\u00e4t, an all-female collective of Wich\u00ed weavers based in a remote part of Argentina, abstraction is a community endeavor. Led by artist Claudia Alarc\u00f3n and curator Andrei Fern\u00e1ndez, the collective is presenting Tewok: the river we weave<\/em> (2026), in which a thicket of 102 weavings\u2014roughly one for each Sil\u00e4t member\u2014covers both sides of a corridor. It becomes difficult to tell where each textiles ends, so tightly bound are they to one another.<\/p>\n

\n\tLast year, Alarc\u00f3n told me that Sil\u00e4t\u2019s weavings are about \u201cshowcasing our knowledge.\u201d In a way, so too are paintings in the Carnegie by d harding and their cousin Jordan Upkett, both of whom are of Bidjara, Ghungalu, and Garingbal heritage. Their Untitled (Private Painting J1)<\/em>, from 2019, is as long as Hong Lee\u2019s frottage is tall\u201435 feet, to be exact\u2014and has an underlayer that\u2019s composed of dry pigment and gum from robusta trees, which are native to eastern Australia. That underlayer records their grandfather\u2019s memories of the Country, or the land as seen from an Aboriginal perspective. But the pigment and gum are largely invisible, because harding and Upkett smeared them with white paint used by the Carnegie Museum to cover its walls. Still, the brownish underlayer refuses to entirely disappear. As that old protest chant goes, the people united will never be defeated.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

[analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/reviews\/carnegie-international-2026-review-1234784979\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/2026-04-27_CI59_Exhibition_Installation-17-Web-3000px.jpg?w=1024″] By my count, there are at least three flying people included in Pittsburgh\u2019s recently opened Carnegie International. One can be found in Khalil Rabah\u2019s video Critical Interrogations: Renewed Belief (1997), in which one man is launched by another over an olive tree, a symbol of resilience in the artist\u2019s native Palestine. Another […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1933399","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1933399","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1933399"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1933399\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1933399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1933399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1933399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}