Sohrab Mohebbi, a curator at SculptureCenter in New York City, has been appointed to organize the next Carnegie International, opening in 2022. Mohebbi, who is thirty-nine and grew up in Iran, is the first Western Asian person to helm the contemporary art survey in its 124-year history.

In an interview with ARTnews, Eric Crosby, the newly appointed director of the Carnegie Museum of Art, said that Mohebbi’s “diverse institutional experience” was among the reasons that he had selected Mohebbi for the job. According to ARTnews, Mohebbi will focus his research around conceptions of “reconstitution” and “decentralization”. Reconstitution involves “acknowledging that the apocalypse—colonialism, environmental disaster—has already happened and so the question is how in this world we can reconstitute our life in the aftermath of it,” and decentralization refers to moving the Carnegie International beyond the confines of the Carnegie Museum of Art and establishing partnerships with other local arts and culture organizations in Pittsburg.

Sohrab Mohebbi is Curator at SculptureCenter. Priori to this he was the associate curator at REDCAT gallery in Los Angeles. During his four-year tenure at REDCAT, Mohebbi organized solo exhibitions with Dave Hullfish Bailey, Tamara Henderson, John Knight, and Falke Pisano. He also put together a number of group exhibitions, including “It is Obvious from the Map” (2017), a collaboration with Thomas Keenan that examined the role of maps and mapmaking in mass exoduses from conflict zones, and “Hotel Theory” (2015), for which he and cocurator Ruth Estévez received the 2013 the Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Award. The show focused on the performance of theory in contemporary art. Previously, Mohebbi was a curatorial fellow at the Queens Museum in New York and a curatorial assistant at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.