The 58th edition, Is it morning for you yet?, attempts to substitute the internationalism of the art market for cross-cultural solidarity

An exhibition is a living body, a curator once told me. If that’s true, biennials have lately needed some resuscitation. In response to this year’s Documenta, The New York Times declared, ‘The dream of a global art world has died’. I’m not so sure, but I’ve lost track of all the glorified group shows that have buried market trends beneath woke discourse and inscrutable poetics. To cast the latest edition of the quinquennial Carnegie International with the lot would be to ignore the earnest success of curator Sohrab Mohebbi’s endeavour. This capacious and heavily researched exhibition features 142 artists and collectives from 40 territories. Many of them are little known in the US, putting Carnegie’s internationalism to the test.

Anchoring the show is a series of historical capsule exhibitions featuring works from parts of the world that have been subject to US imperialism (an almost impossibly broad category). In ‘Refractions’, one moving presentation – mostly focused on US intervention in Latin American from the 1960s to the 1980s – includes photographs by Susan Meiselas documenting the struggles of the Sandinista revolutionaries in Nicaragua’s bloody civil war; Isabel De Obaldía’s watercolours of gruesome atrocities committed by Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega; and posters designed by Claes Oldenburg and Thuraya Al-Baqsami to protest US support of totalitarianism in the region. Several works reflect on the legacies of the Vietnam War, most powerfully Võ An Khánh’s ethereal photographs of Viet Cong soldiers training and tending their wounded in jungle camps. In this tensely agitprop atmosphere, a rarely exhibited work by Felix Gonzalez-Torres stands out for its quietude: Forbidden Colors (1988), comprising four monochrome canvases painted green, red, black and white, respectively – a combination, the artist notes in a wall label, then forbidden in the State of Israel for its association with the Palestinian flag. Alongside ‘Refractions’, loans from the Museum of Solidarity Salvador Allende in Santiago de Chile, founded during Allende’s presidential-election campaign and continued in exile after his 1973 assassination, include works in support of the Chilean resistance from as far afield as Mongolia.

Η συνέχεια εδώ.