On view May 3, 2008 through January 11, 2009.
Widely known as one of the pre-eminent international surveys of contemporary art in the world, the Carnegie International was founded at the behest of industrialist Andrew Carnegie in 1896. With the Venice Biennale, the Carnegie International is the oldest such exhibition in the world. Unparalleled in longevity and influence, it has consistently been among the most innovative and challenging such exhibitions of contemporary art—the only regularly scheduled global survey seen in North America, and the only one anywhere presented in a museum. The 2008 Carnegie International is the 55th installment of this exhibition.
The 2008 Carnegie International presents work by 40 artists – many of whose work is being seen for the first time in an American museum – and will include 204 works in a wide range of media including painting, sculpture, drawing, installation, film, video, sound, and performance. The exhibition occupies 60,000 square feet of galleries and public spaces in the museum.
Titled Life on Mars, the 2008 Carnegie International focuses on the increasingly relevant question of what it means to be human in the world today. The artists investigate particular aspects of the human condition, moving along paths that are both introspective and worldly while poetically traversing the dramatic spectrum from tragedy to comedy. In the end, Life on Mars is posed in the face of an increasingly accelerating world where global events (political, social, natural, and economic) seem to challenge and threaten to overtake our most basic forms of everyday existence. Rather than a literal search for extraterrestrial intelligence, Life on Mars might be seen as a metaphorical quest to explore what it means to be human in this radically unmoored world. Moving from the micro—to the macro—levels of experience, this exhibition proposes to look at the multiple perspectives and myriad responses to this 21st century dilemma from artists from all over the globe.