Are we alone in the universe?

Do aliens exist?

Or are we, ourselves, the strangers in our own worlds?

Life on Mars, the 2008 Carnegie International

on view May 3, 2008 through January 11, 2009.

Widely known as one of the pre-eminent international surveys of contemporary art in the world, the Carnegie International was founded at the behest of industrialist Andrew Carnegie in 1896. With the Venice Biennale, the Carnegie International is the oldest such exhibition in the world. Unparalleled in longevity and influence, it has consistently been among the most innovative and challenging such exhibitions of contemporary art—the only regularly scheduled global survey seen in North America, and the only one anywhere presented in a museum. The 2008 Carnegie International is the 55th installment of this exhibition.

The 2008 Carnegie International will present work by 40 artists – many of whose work will be seen for the first time in an American museum – and will include 204 works in a wide range of media including painting, sculpture, drawing, installation, film, video, sound, and performance. The exhibition will occupy some 60,000 square feet of galleries and public spaces in the museum as well as sites throughout the surrounding neighborhood.

Titled Life on Mars, the 2008 Carnegie International will focus on the increasingly relevant question of what it means to be human in the world today. The artists investigate particular vicissitudes of the human condition, moving along paths that are both introspective and worldly while poetically traversing the dramatic spectrum from tragedy to comedy. In the end, Life on Mars is posed in the face of an increasingly accelerating world where global events (political, social, natural, and economic) seem to challenge and threaten to overtake our most basic forms of everyday existence. Rather than a literal search for extraterrestrial intelligence, Life on Mars might be seen as a metaphorical quest to explore what it means to be human in this radically unmoored world. Moving from the micro—to the macro—levels of experience, this exhibition proposes to look at the multiple perspectives and myriad responses to this 21st century dilemma from artists from all over the globe.