The 55th Carnegie International
’Life on Mars’, the 2008 Carnegie International, is focusing on the increasingly relevant issue of what it actually means to be human in this world today.
Going beyond any universal answers to this complex question, the artists who are part of this exhibition will be investigating various aspects of the present human condition, moving along paths, which are both introspective and worldly even while poetically traversing the deft and dramatic spectrum from comedy to tragedy.
A Curator's Introduction to the show by by Douglas Fogle, elaborating on the show, mentions: “The question, Is there life on Mars?, is a rhetorical one, especially posed in the face of a world in that increasingly accelerating global events- political, social, natural, and economic- appear to challenge and threaten to overtake our most basic forms of everyday existence.
”This question might be seen as a metaphorical quest for exploring what it means to be human in this radically unmoored world rather than a literal search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Moving to the macro from the micro levels of experience, the exhibit proposes to look at the myriad responses and multiple perspectives to this 21st-century dilemma from participating artists from all over the globe.”
Ranjani Shettar, an artist from India is also participating in the exhibition ‘Life on Mars’ that serves as a collective self-portrait of humanity that is colliding with the political and economic events. They define daily existence. Issues of our survival are poignantly and humorously brought to the fore in installations, films, paintings, photographs and sculptures, which search for the sublime in the banality of everyday life.
