5 works you shouldn’t miss at the Carnegie International
Over 100 artists and art collectives have works featured in the 58th Carnegie International art exhibition, which opened Sept. 24 and runs through April 2 at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Oakland.
The International, which began in 1896, has pieces by artists from around the world, as well as local and other American artists, and span nearly every art form and medium.
The works — some new commissions and others made over the past 80 years — “negotiate transnational networks of artistic solidarity and the multigenerational weight of our entangled inheritances,” according to the Carnegie International exhibition guide.
The art touches on intense political and individual matters such as identity and sex but also carries a great deal of whimsy, wit and humor — sometimes all at the same time.
The various offerings together make a textured, expansive experience that is the hallmark of the Carnegie International, the longest running international art exhibition in North America. Making your way through the sprawling museum exhibition is a way to globe-trot through the far reaches of the world of art.
As exciting as that sounds, it’s always nice to have a specific place to start. Here are five works you’ll want to experience:
• “Kambing Hitam (Black Goat)” by Kustiyah (1935-2012) The 1960s oil on canvas forgoes glossiness for a richness created from the Indonesian artist’s unique balancing of light and dark. “Black Goat” is particularly stylized, at once surreal, even dreamlike, but grounded in its simple scene of a goat with its offspring.
• “Girls in Car 4” by Shirin Aliabadi (1978-2018) A stunning color photograph taken in 2005 of three women in hijabs in a car — all of them with a similar look of angst, anger and frustration. The picture was taken nearly 20 years ago, but is as hauntingly profound today amid protest in Iran sparked by the death of a young woman in custody, arrested for allegedly violating the hijab law.
• “Stock Garden,” a live video and sound installation by Soun-Gui Kim (1946- ) Kim’s 2022 art form mashup, which includes a real-time international stock exchange feed and a live plant, is inspired by her 1980s travels through
Asia, where she witnessed traditional ways of life swallowed up by global capitalism. The installation also comes with a projection of two people at a market that herks and jerks as it pauses, rewinds and starts again. There is also an image of produce imposed over the video for a touch of the absurd, tying the many aspects of the piece into a poignant yet humorous meditation on consumerism.
• “Ruins of Two Cities: Mosul and Aleppo” by Dia al-Azzawi (1939- ) This sculpture, made in 2019-21, is a humongous rendering of a pair of cities made out of polyester resin. The work takes up an entire section of a gallery. It’s a remarkable achievement in scale that gives viewers the impression they are flying over the cities. Yet they can pause to explore the pores and pockmarks of civilization in ruin in Iraq and Syria.
• “The Maja Rediscovered” by Kate Millett (1934-2017) The famed feminist writer is also an accomplished sculptor. Millett’s mummified mannequin in a cage speaks to the lifelessness and entrapment brought on by forms of patriarchy, police states and restrictions on sexual freedom. For a touch of rebellion, perhaps hope, there is a bouquet of flowers in a pot inside the cage.