Carnegie Museum of Art | Photography on View on the 59th Carnegie International, ‘If the word we’

Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art places on its 59th International, If the phrase we, on view by way of January 3, 2027. Famously the nation’s most senior exhibition of worldwide artwork, this 12 months’s iteration is the museums most expansive, that includes 36 new commissions and together with pictures, sculpture, efficiency, portray, music, movie, blended media, and extra from 61 globally taking part artists and collectives.

Curators Ryan Inouye, Danielle A. Jackson, and Liz Park arrived on the title from Haytham el-Wardany‘s commissioned essay for the International, by which the author asks, What if the phrase we turns into an area for listening? For the curators, the thought of we is “a complex and heterogenous position,” a place in which the three of them “navigate contradictions of life while being receptive to the frequencies of our surroundings.” What ensues is a show that considers, or perhaps inquires, about the modern conditions, questions, conflicts, and beauties of humanity’s experience—of which both the collective and individual are explored, of which both the interpersonal and intrapersonal are considered.

“It was really important to recognize that there have always been conversations among artists, and we’re not going out there to ‘discover,’” says co-curator Liz Park. “We’re going [around the world, into an artistic conversation] with an open ear and an open mind, to be in relation to artists who are part of a community of peers, students, and mentors.”

Photography On View

Photography, a medium that, in it’s raw reflection of who and what we are (or wish to be) seems especially crucial in relation to this particular theme, excites within the walls of If the word we.

Eric Gyamfi (b. 1990, Bekwai, Ghana).

Park notes that Gyamfi’s project “conceptualizes what photography could have been if, instead of being invented in Europe, it had been invented in Kumasi, Ghana — where he studied and received his MFA.” She continues, “What if the process of developing the medium had incorporated a different conception of time? What if the trees from that environment were used to make the camera? What if the cultural knowledge of how to understand your time on earth was part of remaking the medium entirely?”

Gyamfi built his own cameras (which are on display), and all the photographs in the project are taken with those cameras: self-portraits, group portraits of him and his MFA classmates, stacks of books on photography, a bust of his collaborator, a sculptor who helped him build the camera. Funnels, safe lights, darkroom chemicals — all of these become subjects of photography that speak to his vision of reimagining the medium altogether. “It’s a beautiful and powerful idea,” says Park, “that artistic practice can be a way to re-envision how we see the world.”

Firman Ichsan (born 1953, Jakarta, Indonesia). 

Ichsan’s grand, glamorous fashion portraits grace the walls of Scaife Collection Galleries. According to Inouye, Ichsan “was shooting models during the last days of the dictatorship,” referring to Suharto’s authoritarian regime. Here though, women move with grace and play across the 80s and 90s—and Iscsan immortalizes them, both the individuals posing for his photograph and the culture in which they were taken.

Liz Johnson Artur (born 1964, Sofia, Bulgaria) 

Johnson Artur displays Black Balloon Archive, which lives on the walls overlooking the Hall of Sculpture balcony. Black Balloon Archive is the artist’s life-long, ever-expanding work that documents the African diaspora, capturing an array of moments that range from everyday to the exciting, these small bits that might otherwise go unnoticed and unwitnessed, yet ultimately make up a life.

Other works are preserved in the official printed publication, 59th Carnegie International, where the photographs of Fe Avila (born 1981, São Paulo, Brazil) can be found. Their work explores memory, our relationships to other beings of nature, and the possibilities beyond heteropatriarchal understandings, using photography as a maneuver for elongating the existence of such happenings.

Some of the most immersive works expand into the city…or are perhaps pressed into vinyl. “We made a vinyl LP by the artist Alia Farid,” says Inouye. “Alia had been visiting the southern Iraqi marshlands for several years and was taking field recordings, including one of a particular percussion instrument—a small drum related to the African talking drum from West Africa. She sent a sample to collaborators who are artists and music producers, and they returned with tracks. We’re selling the vinyl, pressed by Hellbender Vinyl based in Pittsburgh….We were thinking about circulation — what if someone can’t come here? How can one of the works still reach them, still be experienced? Because it’s sonic and because we can record things, those things can travel.”

Throughout the city If the word we prevails at the Kamin Science Center, where Torkwase Dyson invites viewers to the Buhl Planetarium and Observatory to experience one part of her two-part presentation, Tomorrow Was Yesterday. Projected on the ceiling of the planetarium, she shows an animation of an underwater habitat being assaulted, extracted—a reflection of her studies of oil drilling in the Caribbean. The other half of this piece is exhibited as an installation at the museum, consisting of sculptural objects and video, paintings and drawings, and further notions reflective of oil and gas extraction on our ecosystems.

At the historic Mattress Factory, Arturo Kameya and Claudia Martínez Garay present La ceniza ya no recuerda qué causó el incendio / The ash no longer remembers what caused the fire, which fills all three stories of the building, creating a new world within each of its nine rooms.

The Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh hosts Sanchayan Ghosh’s cubical creation of light and color, entitled “Post Office: Letters From Here and Elsewhere,” a site-specific co-commission between the Carnegie Art Museum and Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh. Almost playground-like in its structure, Ghosh collaborated with families in Pittsburgh to create ideas of home, memory, and migration.

The basketball court at Thelma Lovette YMCA is home to “Be Holding,” a collaboration between director and playwright Brooke O’Harra and poet Ross Gay. O’Harra directs a performance based on Gay’s 2020 poem Be Holding, which builds upon the story of the Philadelphia 76ers’ Dr. J famous alley-oop, where he gracefully flies across the court during the 1980 NBA Finals. “With the satellite projects, the International has the ability to meet people where they are,” remarks Inouye. “Whether at the Children’s Museum, the YMCA basketball court, or the Carnegie Science Center. We had the opportunity to work with these institutions from the very beginning, to develop projects with them rather than simply renting their venues. They were integral to the production and commissioning process.”

To try and define or explain If the word we is missing the point. Here, Carnegie Museum of Art has posed a question whose answers are infinite, in which each voice that raises to reply presents a new idea, possibility, reality, future. In our attempt at answering, what’s created instead is a room for understanding, and a broadening of the possibilities of what we can be.