Before you enter the building, the building has already made its argument.
The Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh is a Greek Revival monument to the Gilded Age, all white marble, soaring columns, and Roman statuary. Andrew Carnegie built it in 1895 as a temple to civilization, specifically to his idea of what civilization looked like. Walking toward it, you feel the weight of that confidence. This is what culture looks like, it says. This is who gets to own it.
Covering the entire facade, as if someone had something to say about that, is Abraham González Pacheco’s monumental mural Orogenic. It is built from concrete, metal, and vivid pigment, and from a distance it halts your approach before you have even processed what you are looking at. Up close, the surface reveals itself — bright, almost jarring colours, fragments of archaeological objects drawn from the museum’s own collection, each mosaic piece catching the light differently, the metallic elements glinting as you move past. Walk slowly along the wall and the pieces remain discrete, shards of things, remnants of civilizations that didn’t make it into the temple. Step back and something else happens entirely. The fragments resolve into a single churning surface, undulating like waves across the face of the building, vanished civilizations rising and falling together in one restless, luminous whole. González Pacheco is from San Simón el Alto in Malinalco, Mexico, a town with no historical archive. Here he has covered Carnegie’s grand entrance with everything official history forgot. You see it before you see anything else, and it sets the terms for everything inside.
The 59th Carnegie International, running through January 2027, takes its title from a commissioned essay by Egyptian writer Haytham el-Wardany. The phrase, “if the word we,” comes from his thinking about collectivity and his central claim that you cannot be individual without being collective at the same time. To understand what the curators are gesturing towards, it helps to investigate el-Wardany’s book.
The Book of Sleep was written in the spring of 2013 as the Mohammad Morsi government was collapsing in Cairo, yet el-Wardany’s is not a political tract. El-Wardany said of his own method: “My concern was not to create a literary product in the conventional sense, but to try and use literature as a methodology.” The book reads that way, not as an argument building toward a conclusion but as a question that keeps producing more questions. He draws on Walter Benjamin, from classical Arabic storytelling, on the grammar of dreams and what happens to the body when it finally stops. He moves between registers without warning, from the lyrical to the analytical to something close to devotional.
The question at the centre is deceptively simple. What do we become in sleep? What happens to the self we present to the world when we are no longer performing wakefulness? El-Wardany is not interested in sleep as absence. He is interested in it as a kind of opening. “By night,” he writes, “another, quieter force is at work. It spreads its palms over the things day made and liberates them from their destinies.” The sleeper is not sealed off from the world but newly porous to it. Sleep is body opening up to body, the individual Self loosening into something shared.
This has political consequences that el-Wardany takes seriously. “Any occupation where the occupiers do not bed down in their place of protest cannot be relied on,” he writes. The protesters who fell asleep side by side in Tahrir Square ceased to be individuals in a battle and became something else entirely, brokers of a new reality, their dreams the language of that reality. Sleep is not the interruption of politics. It is politics by other means. “The self which does not sleep is a neurotic self, plagued by itself. The group that does not sleep is wilful and proud, unable to alter reality because it exists cut off from it.”
This is the We the curators have built an entire international survey of contemporary art around. Not the We of the rally or the manifesto, but the stranger, harder we that arrives when you have stopped trying to be an individual altogether.
Inside, sixty-one artists from across the world have been gathered to test that idea. The show is vast and sometimes exhausting. The museum’s scale, gallery after marble gallery, can wear you down before the art gets a chance to do its work. But certain pieces stop you in your tracks.
Eric Gyamfi, a photographer from Accra, Ghana, built a series of pinhole cameras from local plant materials and displayed them alongside the photographs they produced. The question behind the work is so simple it takes a moment to fully land: what would photography look like if its invention had been determined by Ghanaian ecologies, concepts of time, and technologies rather than European ones? The cameras themselves are part of the answer, handmade, organic, utterly unlike the precision instruments the medium’s history takes for granted. The photographs they produce are surreal and layered, some multiple exposures of the same scene made with different apparatus, so that you feel you are seeing the same moment from different states of mind. Standing in front of them, you realize the question is not just aesthetic. Who gets to decide what tools we use to record reality, and whose reality gets recorded? Gyamfi answers by building the camera from scratch.
Mohit Shelare from Nagpur, India fills his large-scale paintings with the things we throw away. The work is rendered in vibrant, almost affectionate detail, in conversation with the tradition of landscape painting but depicting a landscape nobody romanticizes. On a white plate affixed to the wall, Shelare writes that he looks “beyond the international as a geographic map and its human differences to the world of commons that is approaching us,” a world full of tension “between what we can think and what is unthinkable, the living and the dead, what we desire and what we discard.” Catastrophe, he argues, can lead us “to new kinds of discovery that are not outside of nature but constitutive of it.” Hanging in a museum built to celebrate civilization’s finest hours, that argument has a particular sting.
Not everything in the show strains toward the profound. Walter Scott, a comic artist from Kahnawà:ke, Canada, contributes a giant diorama with a single line of text: “REALITY HAS LESS TO DO WITH ME THAN I THOUGHT.” In a show this earnestly invested in collective consciousness and the politics of belonging, that line lands like a well-timed cough. Sometimes one sentence does more work than a roomful of installations.
In a red room, you sit on a pink fur settee and watch Natasha Tontey’s twenty-seven-minute film Garden Amidst the Flame. A Minahasan girl from North Sulawesi shaves her eyebrows and begins to see ghosts. She finds other girls, and together they learn a martial art traditionally performed only by men. But the room itself is doing something to you before the film does. The red is enveloping rather than alarming, warm and hypnotic, the kind of light that makes you want to stay inside it. You are already halfway between the ordinary world and somewhere else before the girl in the film gets there herself. Tontey made it with her neighbours and friends. It is the piece in the show that comes closest to what el-Wardany is actually describing, a We that is not declared or organized but simply happens, through sitting together in the dark while someone else’s story quietly becomes your own.
The collective Silät presents a forest of a hundred and two weavings, each made by a different woman from Santa Victoria Este, a small town sitting in the borderlands where Argentina, Bolivia, and Paraguay meet. The weavings come from the fibre of the chaguar bromeliad plant, which the Wichí people, indigenous to that region, have worked with for generations. For the Wichí, weaving is not a hobby or a craft tradition in any decorative sense. It is how knowledge survives. Each piece carries what that particular woman remembers about the Pilcomayo river, which the Wichí call the Tewoklhe, a river that crosses national borders the way rivers do, without asking. A hundred and two separate acts that together make something none of them could have made alone. It is the most honest piece in the show.
Walking out through Carnegie’s marble halls, past the Roman busts and the Gilded Age portraits, I kept thinking about the difference between the political we and el-Wardany’s other one. The We of the march and the manifesto is easy enough to recognize. The one he is really after is harder to name. It is what happens when you stop asserting yourself long enough for something else to come in. When you fall asleep beside strangers in a public square. When you sit in a red room and let a ghost story get under your skin.
El-Wardany writes that the sleeping protesters in Tahrir Square were no longer individuals in a battle. In giving themselves over to unconsciousness they had become something more open and more powerful. The question this show is really asking, underneath all the ambition and all that marble, is whether art can do the same thing. Whether sixty-one artists gathered under one roof can produce in you that same willingness to come undone a little.
Some of the work gets there. A hundred women weaving a river from memory. A Ghanaian artist building the camera that Europe never thought to make. A Mexican artist from a town history forgot, covering Carnegie’s grand entrance with everything that didn’t make it into the official story. And a red room where a ghost story becomes, for a little while, something you share with whoever happens to be sitting next to you.
The building says civilization is singular, monumental, and settled. The show inside disagrees. For once, the show wins.
