2008 Carnegie International

05/03/2008

The Carnegie Museum of Art's 2008 Carnegie International runs from May 3, 2008 - Jan 11, 2009. The Carnegie International is the oldest international survey of contemporary art in North America, and the 2008 installment is the 55th exhibition in its history.

The theme of this year's exhibition is "Life on Mars", and focuses on the increasingly relevant question of what it means to be human in the world today. Foregoing any universal answers to this question, the artists in the exhibition 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. The question "is there life on Mars?" is a rhetorical one, posed in the face of a world in which increasingly accelerating 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, this question might be seen as a metaphorical quest to explore what it means to be human in this radically unmorred world. Moving from the micro to macro levels of experience, the exhibition proposes to look at the multiple perspectives and myriad responses to this 21st-century dilemma from artists from all over the globe.

Today, a concern with the question of what it means to be human can be found in contemporary art everywhere. Many of the younger artists in the exhibition have inherited a legacy that seeks to produce the momentary, the ephemeral, and the modest rather than the monumental. One sees in their work not a discredited universal humanism but a real connection to the human condition, expressed with an economy of means that is at once fragile and powerful.

Life on Mars is a collective self-portrait of humanity colliding with the economic and political events that define daily existence. Questions of our survival are humorously and poignantly brought to the fore in films, installations, paintings, sculptures, and photographs that search for the sublime in the banality of everyday life.

While You're Here...

• Frick Art + Historical Center

  The Frick Art and Historical Center is a fascinating complex of museums and historical buildings located on over five acres of lawns and gardens in Pittsburgh's residential East End. The Center is devoted to the interpretation of the life and times of industrialist and art collector Henry Clay Frick. Exhibitions of fine and decorative art are also presented at the Center.
  Get discounted tickets to the Frick

• Mattress Factory

  Hailed as the best facility for installation art in the United States, the Mattress Factory is a contemporary art museum that commissions, exhibits and collects new site-specific installations created by artists in residence.
  Get discounted tickets to the Mattress Factory

• Andy Warhol Museum

  The world's largest single-artist museum devoted to one of the 20th century's most iconic figures, featuring permanent collections of art and archives, and regular temporary exhibitions including the work of other artists.
  Get discounted tickets to the Warhol