The Carnegie International Tests What “We” Still Means in a Fractured World
This is a year of closely watched biennials, from the late Koyo Kouoh’s historic Venice Biennale to the Whitney Biennial in New York. If 2026 is the year we might just begin to understand where things are heading and grasp the broader state of the world, then this unusual concentration of exhibitions, combined with ongoing geopolitical shifts, offers a compelling testing ground—both at a human and an artistic level.
Now in its 59th edition, the Carnegie International is the oldest survey of contemporary art in the United States, dating back to 1896, when it was founded by industrialist Andrew Carnegie as part of a broader project to turn Pittsburgh into a cultural capital, “as famous for art as it is for steel.” It was a very different city at the time, in a very different United States. One can still read both ambition and optimism in its architecture, its neo-Gothic-inspired buildings transitioning seamlessly into the Gilded Age industrial skyscrapers of the 1920s. In that sense, Pittsburgh in some ways feels closer to Germany or Switzerland, its historic buildings recalling a time when the city was bursting with international energies and voices, drawn by its role as a major industrial and cultural hub in the U.S.
From the outset, the Carnegie International was conceived not simply as a museum or a taste-making national exhibition, but as an educational instrument: a recurring survey of contemporary art from around the world that would both elevate public taste and build the collection of the Carnegie Museum of Art through strategic acquisitions. This explains why the Carnegie International remains anchored within its institution and its local community: the show is presented within the museum’s collection, with the exception of a few off-sites. It has, however, partnered this year for the first time with other local institutions—the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, Kamin Science Center, Mattress Factory and the Thelma Lovette YMCA—that function as entry points to different segments of the city’s community. Among the goals of the Carnegie International, as director Eric Crosby put it, is “to make Pittsburgh a place where art happens.”
At the center of the 2026 edition is the title “If the word we,” which emerged from a collaboration and dialogue with writer Haytham el-Wardany. Curators Ryan Inouye, Danielle A. Jackson and Liz Park chose to involve him not only as an advisor—which is becoming more common—but as a participant in the thinking process itself, as they noted during the presentation. While this is not always immediately legible in the exhibition, the text commissioned from el-Wardany ultimately set the tone and the overall approach: thinking as a collective of diverse voices, more attuned to teaching others and to their surroundings. The curatorial team, in turn, began to think collectively, eventually assembling a similarly diverse global chorus. “We as a unified subject” became the key thread—banal as it may read, difficult as it is in practice—which, in today’s fragmented and divided society, makes it all the more urgent and relevant. “What if the word ‘we’ becomes a space for listening?” el-Wardany offers in his text. “We” is deliberately adopted here, a complex and heterogeneous position from which the three of us navigate contradictions of life while being receptive to the frequencies of our surroundings.
Concurrently, the curators intentionally focused on familiar forms, framing them as an open invitation for diverse audiences to engage with the exhibition and actively contribute to the production of meaning. As a result, the quadrennial begins in public spaces and lobbies, treating these transitional zones as integral to the exhibition itself, with installations staged before the galleries. One of the first encounters is a collaborative project by Elle-Máijá Apiniskim Tailfeathers, Hans Ragnar Mathisen and Joar Nango, all of whom are connected to Norway. Mathisen is particularly known for his 1975 map of Sápmi, which envisioned a borderless homeland for the Indigenous Sámi across northern Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. Architect and artist Joar Nango extends this approach into a spatial proposition that accompanies Apiniskim Tailfeathers’ video storytelling of Mathisen’s life, resulting in a lively entanglement where shared authorship, as much as lived experience, becomes central to the work.
On the main floor are easy-to-approach but no less structurally and poetically elaborated ikebana-inspired sculptures by Japanese artist Kenjiro Katayama. There is beauty in the composition, but also a subtle sense of transience in the awareness that these materials will mutate over time and decay, making the sculpture ephemeral and transitional, as with most human creations.
Next is a tree-like sculpture by Sofu Teshigahara, founder of the radical Sogetsu school of ikebana, which reimagined the centuries-old art of Japanese flower arrangement in dialogue with modern life, architecture and shifting ways of inhabiting the world. The presentation traces Teshigahara’s practice across materials and forms—wood, metal, ink, sculpture, calligraphy—always filtered through ikebana poetry. At its center, Yakumo (Eightfold Clouds) (1962), carved from a camphor tree uprooted by the 1959 Isewan Typhoon, carries within it both a sense of displacement and endurance, matter already charged with history, while extending an ecology of form into space and embodied awareness.
This link to geological time and exercise in reattunement with natural cycles emerges elsewhere in the exhibition, as in Reina Sugihara’s intuitive cartographies, where abstraction begins to resemble organic growth, fungal spread and slow biological processes. Inspired by reflections on breath—shallow, interrupted or shared during the pandemic—her abstractions expand and contract across their surface, holding a fragile balance between interior and exterior, visibility and its absence.
Work in the Carnegie International focuses on the themes one can expect from any major global art survey today: postcolonial and post-conceptual explorations through archives and family histories, abstraction as a site of both personal expression and memory, rituals that reconnect the body with the collective, and studies of water and plant life as exercises in reattunement with natural rhythms.
Combining several of these tropes at once, Asinnajaq, an Indigenous artist from Canada, presents a meditation on endurance and inheritance through video and installation, where traditional objects are staged on a slate as offerings, set against the brute force of a harsh winter in the city. Inspired by their grandmother Lucy Weetaluktuk’s soapstone carving of figures packing a qamutik—an Inuit sled—the work unfolds as a score titled qamutik piece, reflecting on “what we carry with us emotionally.” “We also carry strengths. We carry the lands that give us life, too,” the artist notes. Accompanying the videos is the trace of Asinnajaq’s enactment of the score, packing and journeying from Inukjuak to Pittsburgh via Montréal. In the video, the traditional sleds transform into both a vessel and an offering, appearing in the space as carrying these amorphous, unidentifiable materials.
Nearby, RJ Messineo similarly approaches material and memory through abstraction, where gesture becomes a record of entropy and presence. This suite of four commissioned abstract works explores instability and accumulation, as traces blend almost metaphorically into a collective dance of relationships and lineages under uncertain conditions. Sensorially engaging, almost like a musical score, is the juxtaposition with Harding’s more subtle atmospheric abstract landscape, in collaboration with Jordan Upkett, who uses Aboriginal painting to chart rock art sites, leaving white space as a field for imagining them breathing with the earth, attuned to its frequencies.
Then the conversation turns to the body and how it occupies space within the tension between culture and nature that defines the present moment. In Khalil Rabah’s work, gestures and ritual, performed against the camera in unsettlingly epidermal close-ups, become ways to inhabit and test that condition. For more than 35 years, Rabah has examined the entanglement of everyday life and institutional frameworks across Palestine and the broader region, focusing on rituals and photographic performances binding body, land, belief and touch.
Particularly poignant is the multilayered work by Donald Rodney, which occupies an entire room and pushes this tension between the individual and collective body even further. Bringing medical imaging into contemporary art, his X-rays become both surface and metaphor, exposing the violence embedded in medical and racial histories. Doublethink (1992) confronts stereotypes and public representation, while Visceral Canker (1990), with its pumping tubes of theatrical blood, becomes a metaphor for both the human heart and the heart of a nation. The work unfolds as a powerful reflection on body politics—past and present—and on the limits between performativity and conformity, asking how individual expression survives within collective structures.
The installation that follows encourages this passage from the individual to the collective imagination, inviting visitors to lie down under an immersive video constellation. Shala Miller’s Flight (2026) reimagines the myth of the “Flying Africans”—rooted in Gullah folklore and the 1803 Igbo Landing—as a meditation on grief, escape and survival. Drawing on Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Miller frames flight as both superpower and rupture, introducing a shapeshifting figure who moves between protection and loss. The shadow theater-like video collage plays with light and visibility, inviting you to surrender to another attempt at mythopoiesis through contemporary means.
Some of the most evocative interventions are those that stage a direct dialogue with the architecture. And being the Carnegie, a museum shaped in its original structure by neoclassical ambitions, there is a lot to work with.
On the balcony, Alix Johnson Arthur presents selections from her ongoing Black Balloon Archive, a lifelong project documenting the diversity of Black life across continents. Meanwhile, Miller Robinson has placed, with very precise rhythm, over 40 Indigenous baskets from northwestern California communities—Yurok, Pomo, Hupa, Karuk—removed from storage and returned to marble plinths within the Hall of Sculpture, where they quietly infiltrate the museum’s neoclassical order. Downstairs, in the wood-paneled miniature room, swarms of “medicine moths” made from fish bones gathered at the Salton Sea animate the installation, evoking ancestral flight and a porous exchange between sky and sea.
Yet one of the most scenically effective is Wu Tsang’s reflection on memory inspired by the opera Carmen, which the artist describes as “a condensation of clichés and fantasies, but one that escapes actually being that thing [and] remains ungraspable.” Staged within the museum’s Hall of Architecture, a neoclassical environment with 150 plaster-cast façades and model replicas of European buildings, the moving image and sound installation assembles a visual archive of Carmen performances across stage and film. Tsang further dramatizes the figure, myth and musicality of the protagonist’s subjectivity, pushing it into a space where it continuously slips between representation and projection, archetype and psychological character.
Nearby, in Green Hall Annex (2026), Cinthia Marcelle transforms the Carnegie Museum of Art’s neoclassical Hall of Sculpture—modeled after the Parthenon—into a charged reflection on democracy, media and institutional power. Taking as her point of departure the reconstruction of Brazil’s National Congress after the January 8, 2023, attack—echoing the January 6 U.S. Capitol attack—Marcelle’s “temple” is constructed not from stone but from circulating text: news coverage surrounding the contested renovation. Walking under this oppressively heavy ceiling of newspapers, the installation suggests that the written word is not neutral reportage but an active structure, one that produces narratives and fixes history in real time. Positioned within a space that mimics the origins of Western democracy, Marcelle’s work asks what it means when institutions are continually “renovated,” and how those processes are mediated, obscured and ultimately remembered.
Interrupting this overall heavy tenor, one might love the quirkiness of Walter Scott’s Wendy installation, which captures a different register of Millennial and Gen Z lived experience: this “trash European girl” exists through materials sprawled in her studio, surrounded by debris, embodying a cycle of emotional excess and creative paralysis. A companion doll, trapped in a glass case, sharpens this portrait of self-doubt and collective anxiety.
The corridor that follows is what really gives you a thrill: a constellation of dark silhouettes of weapons suspended overhead by Brazilian artist Ana Raylander Mártis dos Anjos. Carefully arranged in light boxes mounted to the ceiling, some of these objects were confiscated, while others were handmade and improvised—essentially knives and pointed tools. You only see their shadows as you walk through, turning the passage into a powerful visual metaphor for our relationship to danger, violence and weapons as they become more widespread but also increasingly invisible and strategically muted. You are placed under the weight of these aggressive forces, sublimated by a screen that filters them into an acceptable narrative and participatory experience.
In a nearby room, a wheel of fortune turns into a wheel of violence and loss in Kearra Amaya Gopee’s marginalia, in dialogue with a biomythographic video drawn from the artist’s relationship with their father, a former member of Trinidad and Tobago’s Flying Squad. Formed in the 1970s to combat crime through extrajudicial force and later disbanded after scandal, the unit anchors a work where each segment is marked by loss, exposing the limits and arbitrariness of justice.
Digital art appears at the Carnegie only sporadically. In an unsettling video work, Li Yi-Fan adopts a do-it-yourself approach to filmmaking, developing his own software and hardware systems, including a custom-built game engine, to produce the real-time 3D animation What Is Your Favorite Primitive (2023). Staged as a mock tech keynote, humanoid avatars perform disturbing actions as the artist probes the ethics of image-making through software. The result is both fascinating and unsettling: the figures feel almost alive, yet remain visibly constrained by the systems that generate them, exposing the limits of the technology as much as its creative potential.
In contrast, Natasha Tontey uses the fluidity of video as a tool for preserving and reactivating ancestral storytelling. Using docufiction in Garden Amidst the Flame (2022), she draws from Minahasan rituals in North Indonesia, following a coming-of-age narrative in which a young girl must confront ancestral spirits that resist her assimilation into contemporary culture. What could be read as a personal story unfolds instead as a larger tension between survival and erasure. Digital tools here become a means of recording, reviving and transmitting knowledge at risk, holding together past and present in a fragile, unresolved tension.
The exhibition path becomes less straightforward as the show progresses and integrates even more closely with the existing collection. This makes sense when, in the Scaife galleries, the curators stage a series of focused presentations on overlooked female artists from the past century. One of these is Saloua Raouda Choucair, whose multidisciplinary practice unfolds across sculpture, painting, design and craft, where abstract geometries and calligraphic forms move fluidly between monumental and domestic scales, reflecting both Lebanese artisanal traditions and the collaborative ethos she encountered at Cranbrook. Nearby, Indonesian photographer Firman Ichsan traces the power of fashion imagery in shaping cultural imaginaries, capturing the emergence of an urban middle class and the shifting roles of women in late 20th-century Indonesia, while bridging tradition and modernity through collaborations with batik designer Iwan Tirta. Beatriz González deepens this dialogue with a more overtly political edge, appropriating mass media imagery onto domestic objects to confront Colombia’s history of violence and collective mourning. Across her works, everyday materials become carriers of subversive narratives, where humor and urgency collide.
From that point, a few galleries later, you can begin to track the Carnegie International again, starting with Eric Gyamfi reimagining photography itself as a speculative tool, asking what the medium might look like if rooted in Kumasi, Ghana. Through experimental processes—pinhole cameras, refracted light, organic materials—these kaleidoscopic images blur the lines between documentation, invention and the reimagination of alternative histories. Tactility returns as a cultural code in Silät’s Tewok: the river we weave (2026), a collective installation by over 100 Indigenous Wichí women from Argentina. Suspended like a forest, the weavings—each tied to memory, knowledge and the Pilcomayo River—form a living cosmology, where material, gesture and community become inseparable.
A different grounding unfolds in the room of Indigenous artists tied to G. Peter Jemison, which visitors first encounter through the van parked out front, only later discovering the narrative that unfolds inside the museum. A lifelong organizer and advocate for the arts and culture of the Haudenosaunee, Jemison invited Jay Carrier, Katsitsionni Fox, Hayden Haynes, Tom Huff, Craig Marvin, Diane Schenandoah and Randee Spruce to present their work alongside his own. In a re-creation of a 1975 touring exhibition, he has driven a vintage Chevy van from upstate New York to deliver the works, collapsing the distance between making, traveling and showing. Around it, contemporary expressions of Haudenosaunee craft and cultural knowledge sit alongside his paintings mapping Ga’dä gës gëögeh (Cattaraugus Reservation), his childhood home, grounding the work in lived experience and continuity.
It is probably in the off-site locations that the Carnegie International becomes most context-specific and actively engages with the city. “Outside location, we wanted to have extraordinary artists to get people across town,” the curators explained. And indeed, these off-site interventions are among the most impressive in the quadrennial.
Straddling both Carnegie and Venice, Torkwase Dyson’s Tomorrow Was Yesterday takes over the planetarium at the science center. A research-based work on oil and gas extraction in the Caribbean unfolds as an immersive underwater video, extending her exploration of transatlantic histories. “What are the depths of your mining?” becomes both a question and a condition of the experience. The work begins in her studio, grounding the video within her practice and her exploration of form in relation to space. From there, it shifts perspective—submerging the viewer into an underwater world, an inverted dimension viewed from above. A spider-like creature moves in a kind of dance, but there is violence in its presence: a parasitic force creeping across the surface, contaminating it with black clouds and drops, destabilizing what once held balance.
At the Children’s Museum, in dialogue with its collection and mission, Sanchayan Ghosh’s Dakghar/Post Office appears as a prismatic, almost crystalline structure—something between a Kubrick-like cube and a mineral formation. Inspired by Tagore’s story of a child confined indoors, learning the world through what passes by his window, the work unfolds through light and shadow in a constant interplay between the visible and the invisible. The installation functions both as document and as process, a space where presence and absence fold into one another, “at the feel in my pulse of the rhythm of creation, cadence by the swing of endless time.”
Yet the most successful intervention is Arturo Kameya and Claudia Garay Martinez’s takeover of Mattress Factory with their layered spatial and evocative storytelling. A mythology of degradation unfolds—the contradictions of Peruvian society amplified within the recreation of a domestic environment—but also a poetry of decay, unsettling yet seductive, as spirituality becomes an anchor for everyday survival. Remnants of consumption become fossils of resilience. “A revolution is not made overnight,” reflects a character in one of the videos, unfolding a narrative in which indigenous knowledge and rural ritual collide with fragments of contemporary life. Set within a neighborhood marked by early industrial labor, the intervention carries a strong nostalgic charge, tying personal memory to broader systems of endurance amid societal tension.
Overall, what the Carnegie International delivers is a strong selection of practices engaging today’s pressing issues from a distinctly global perspective, staged in dialogue with the museum’s and the city’s history. It may lack a singular, clearly articulated thesis, but it nonetheless presents a sequence of strong voices forming a synced chorus that enacts a compelling notion of collectivity—or perhaps more precisely, collegiality: people interrogating the time we are living in together, but from different perspectives. A platform for a shared process of critical interrogation as much as critical imagination, necessary to move, as a collective, toward what comes next. In its heterogeneous chorus of voices, the Carnegie International not only tests but also allows us to explore what “we” might still mean in such a fractured time of societal division.
More in Art Fairs, Biennials and Triennials
