A white wall gallery space that is densely filled with various floor standing sculptures and works hung on the walls.
ABOVE: Installation view of the 58th Carnegie International featuring works by Trương Công Tùng, Courtesy of the artist and Carnegie Museum of Art; photo: Sean Eaton

Is it morning for you yet?


Review
Jessica Oberdick


The 58th Carnegie International, Is it morning for you yet? at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, PA, is the latest iteration of the Carnegie’s long running international art exhibition, and seeks to answer, “how artists are responding to the critical questions of our time.” Organized by curator Sohrab Mohebbi, associate curator Ryan Inouye and curatorial assistant Talia Heiman and combining artworks “from the collections of international institutions, estates, and artists, alongside new commissions and works by contemporary artists,” the exhibition spans multiple floors of the Carnegie Museum and presents a dynamic variety of artworks encompassing painting, installation, sculpture and video work, amongst other media.

Given that “the critical questions of our time” are not defined by the Carnegie, the exhibition features a wide expanse of artists with differing theoretical and thematic interests. Rather than attempt to cover the exhibition as a whole, this review focuses on three artists whose works revolve around similar themes to uncover some of the critical questions contemporary artists are grappling with.

At the beginning of the International is a massive floor sculpture depicting a bird’s eye view of two cities in Iraq and Syria respectively, Mosul and Aleppo. Created from polyester resin but appearing as though it has been sculpted in mud, the sculpture, resting on the gallery floor, has recreated multiple buildings, temples, and bridges that exist throughout the cities. Some of the forms have been crushed and toppled to represent the destruction of the cities through war, and their consequent rebuilding and altered states under various political regimes. Ruins of Two Cities: Mosul and Aleppo (2020), by artist Dia al-Azzawi, has, as noted in the text for the work, been constructed to reference the way many people in the Western world view conflicts in the Middle East: from a great distance, removed from the actual threats and destruction, safely on their screens at home. But for Al-Azzawi, the piece also represents the internal political conflicts that ravage the city—the way they have been “completely destroyed—not by invading armies…but by their own sons, who were recruited by external forces to join fanatical factions within an endless political and sectarian conflict.”

Despite its size, the city-scape appears delicate and fragile, as though a child’s hand or unsuspecting visitor’s foot could easily destroy it. It is this delicate quality of the sculpture that reinforces al-Azzawi’s desire to represent destruction as a looming consequence of inter-political friction. The sculpture acts as a witness to the two cities at this current moment in time, an artifact preserving history and culture. It is a reminder for the viewer of the continued cultural losses through destruction that the cities face, and how easily cultures can be reduced to a single historical object within a gallery space.

Fragility and destruction, though confronted differently, characterize one of the Carnegie Museum’s commissions, Édgar Calel’s Oyonïk (The Calling) (2022). Calel’s installation is composed of 75 ceramic vessels accompanied by a series of colored-pencil drawings of pottery shards. Ranging in size and shape, with a combination of narrow and wide mouths, the vessels appear in various shades of mud-red. Each is filled with clear water,  rose petals, and has a single, thin tree branch placed across its opening. Pointing in different directions, the branches restrict viewers from moving amongst the vessels. Along the gallery wall, Calel’s pottery shard drawings are evenly spaced across the wall in crisp wood frames with clean white mats—a sharp contrast to the arbitrary placement of the vessels.

In the text accompanying Calel’s installation, there are two important things to note: The first is that the vessels represent a traditional Mayan Kaqchikel cultural healing ritual performed “for people who are lost, both physically missing or spiritually adrift”.1 The second is that the drawings represent found pottery shards buried on the artist’s familial land that Calel believes “were intentionally broken and buried by their ancestors, as an act of cultural preservation to prevent colonizers from seizing objects and the cultural knowledge manifest in them.”2

Like al-Azzawi, Calel creates visual offerings that depict the internal destruction of culture,  positioning the viewer to act as witness. The recreation of the vessels and presentation of the ritual objects within the gallery both preserves and enacts their ritual qualities. Within the gallery, the ritualistic objects become a commodity—to be consumed by the viewer, by institutions like the Carnegie, and potentially in future museum collections. This consumption seems to activate the ritual, as though in the act of being consumed, in being presented and shared with the audience, the objects find use-value and offer the viewer a chance to take part in this calling for the lost. To preserve and share his culture, Calel takes a gamble. He recreates and presents the vessels to the ancestors of the colonizers they were originally destroyed to be protected from, and even invites them as participants. This preserves them perhaps forever, in the protective space of a museum–while also disseminating his cultural practices to the masses and opening it to appropriation.

Another commissioned work is Truong Công Tùng’s installation, the state of absence—voices from outside, (2020),  which explores the interruption of natural landscapes by the actions of man—industrialization, war, and modernization—as they affect the Central Highlands of Vietnam. The work examines how, against the odds, cultural practices and rituals are sustained. In his floor installation, a series of crisp, white “garden beds” designed in a curving pattern to match the aesthetics of the white cube gallery, are filled with a simple topsoil. Above the soil rests multiple gourds of varied shapes in rich earthen brown hues. The gourds are connected by clear hoses that push water between them, crisscrossing and tangling between the various beds. The hoses mingle on the gallery floor and connect the beds to his central floor piece, Forest Dust (form, faith, fear), a sculptural work composed of rubber tree roots, wooden beads, funeral garlands, soil and plastic fertilizer beads. Tùng’s combination of natural and man-made materials feel muddled together; disordered hoses and objects littered with the crisp pedestal-like garden beds reflect the entanglement of natural and man-made structures that at times flow together beautifully and can also seem starkly contrasted.

The contrast between the crispness of the garden beds—naturally intertwining with the aesthetics of what one would expect to encounter in a gallery—with the gritty and twisted soil and hoses, reflects the challenges faced by the inhabitants of the Central Highlands as they stretch to adapt and maintain their culture. In Tung’s installation, the gallery represents the modernization of land–a powerful force with rigid expectations for presentation. Be it the modern rural farm or a developed city, we often have predetermined visual representations of what modern means. Tung’s installation then is a visual descriptor of the preserved Vietnamese Highland culture, illustrating how these communities of people are forced to adapt and work with these expectations–and the sometimes disordered ways they intertwine.

In each installation, these three artists grapple with the balance between preservation and modernization. To preserve their cultures, each makes a compromise by deciding to share it globally, risking how it will be interpreted, and which parts will be the most valuable to audiences. Perhaps the critical questions the artists are asking then is, if where we encounter diverse cultures and rituals determines how much we care about or respect them. Does seeing al-Azzawi’s Mosul and Aleppo on the gallery floor invoke a greater empathy than seeing the city's destruction on TV? Does the simple fact of being in a museum space enact an urgency in viewers to protect and preserve?

Within the walls of the Carnegie, these artist’s work, along with the many others on view, challenge viewers to earnestly consider what it means to share in their culture but also to consider in what ways their art is absorbed and assimilated into the museum. Historically, indigenous cultural objects and non-Western art objects have often found their ways into museums nefariously3 and are then displayed in ways that not only mis-represent their provenance, but rob them of their sacred value. Or as said by Matías Cornejo González in Museum Performativity and the Agency of Sacred Objects, museum’s “display (indigenous sacred  objects) in ways that perpetuate the idea of Western supremacy over the cultures these artworks represent.”4 The key difference with the Carnegie International, is the artworks these artists present are being shown with permission and with specific intention to share their cultures and the current challenges they face at the hands of colonization and modernization. The gamble or compromise these artists are making then, is the risk of their artworks losing their cultural meaning to the Westernized space of the museum. They risk their work becoming mere objects of aesthetic value, or curiosities from foreign lands for Western audiences.

To quote González again, “the significance or value of an object relies on the way (museum visitors) interact with it”.5 Museums, then, have a significant responsibility in how their audiences interact with their objects from display to accompanying texts, but so too do their audiences. While museums can and should seek to enhance the cultural understanding of their artworks, perhaps the challenge for museum visitors is whether we leave with more of an appreciation for the art as object or with an understanding of the cultures they represent. And how do we carry that forward outside the museum space.
A white wall gallery space that is densely filled with various floor standing sculptures and works hung on the walls.
Installation view of the 58th Carnegie International featuring works by Trương Công Tùng, Courtesy of the artist and Carnegie Museum of Art; photo: Sean Eaton


In the corner of a white wall gallery space there are three hanging paintings that resemble each other, two directly in front, and one to the right, and in between is a floor standing abstract sculpture that resembles a larger than life fishing lure.
Installation view of the 58th Carnegie International featuring works by Trương Công Tùng, Courtesy of the artist and Carnegie Museum of Art; photo: Sean Eaton


 A White wall gallery space that an installation of several dozen terracotta clay pots of different shapes and sizes placed in a group on the ground. Behind is a row of evenly spaced framed works.
Installation view of Édgar Calel, Oyonïk (The calling) (detail), 2022, in the 58th Carnegie International, Courtesy of the artist and Carnegie Museum of Art; photo: Sean Eaton


Several terracotta clay pots are placed on the ground and seen from overhead. They are filled with a liquid with flower petals floating on top, and each have a thin leafless twig placed sideways on top.
Installation view of Édgar Calel, Oyonïk (The calling)(detail), 2022, in the 58th Carnegie International, Courtesy of the artist and Carnegie Museum of Art; photo: Sean Eaton


A white wall gallery space that has a floor installation taking up nearly the entire room of a sand colored, maze-like shallow relief, that resembles a large city as if seen from far above. Four larger paintings line the walls behind.
Installation view of the 58th Carnegie International featuring works by Dia al-Azzawi and Melike Kara, Courtesy of Carnegie Museum of Art; photo: Sean Eaton


A sand colored, maze-like shallow relief, that resembles a large city as if seen from far above.
Installation view of Dia al-Azzawi, Ruins of Two Cities: Mosul and Aleppo (detail), 2019-2021, Courtesy of the artist and Carnegie Museum of Art; photo: Sean Eaton



Notes:
  1. Exhibition text for Edgar Calel’s “Oyonïk (The Calling), in “Is it Morning for you yet” 58th annual Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art
  2. Exhibition text for Edgar Calel’s “Oyonïk (The Calling)
  3. Matías Cornejo González, Museum Performativity and the Agency of Sacred Objects, ICOFOM Study Series [Online], 47(1-2) | 2019, Online since 12 October 2019, October 2019. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/iss/1413 ; DOI : 10.4000/iss.1413 pages 76-77
  4. González, Museum Performativity and the Agency of Sacred Objects, pg. 77
  5. González, Museum Performativity and the Agency of Sacred Objects, pg. 78

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4.30.23

Jessica Oberdick (she/her) is an independent curator and writer whose research focuses on themes of identity and social perception. She currently works as the Exhibitions Assistant at the University of Louisville.

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