BRYAN CONLEY
The Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh has offered further details about the 2018 edition of the Carnegie International, its survey of the international contemporary art scene, which appears every three to five years. Next year’s show, the International’s 57th edition, will open on October 12, 2018, and run through March 25, 2019. As announced more than two years ago, Ingrid Schaffner, formerly the chief curator of the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, is organizing the 2018 International.
The exhibition’s organizers have yet to reveal a full participant list, but it has named a few artists who have been selected. Joan Jonas, the video-art pioneer who is set to have a Tate Modern retrospective next year, will create a new piece with the Vietnamese collective Art Labor. Work by the young Kenyan photographer Mimi Cherono Ng’ok and the 92-year-old Pittsburgh-based sculptor Thaddeus Mosley will also be on view.
In an interview with ARTnews, Schaffner said that the 2018 International will explore the changing meaning of words like “global” for today’s art world. “The goal was not to bring artists back to Pittsburgh, but to see how ‘the contemporary’ exists in our world today,” Schaffner said of her research, which has included traveling to remote locales on different continents. “What resonated so much was the way artists were making local contexts for the places where they are.” The question at stake for the artists in the show, she said, is, “What is ‘the international’?”
A number of different curatorial advisers have accompanied Schaffner on her travels so far, including M+ museum chief curator Doryun Chong, newly named MoMA PS1 curator Ruba Katrib (who previously worked at SculptureCenter), and Vera List Center for Art and Politics director Carin Kuoni, as well as Bisi Silva, the artistic director of the Centre for Contemporary Art in Lagos, and independent curator Magalí Arriola.