A global crisis demanded an international response and that is reflected in the exhibition’s final roster, a diverse group that includes the Syrian artists Yara Said and Moutaz Arian, Reena Saini Kallat of India, Candice Breitz of South Africa, Ai Weiwei of China, and others. In all, 12 artists will fill the 18,000 square feet of exhibition space at SITE, New Mexico’s most prominent contemporary art museum.

The contributors are bonded by a similar theme — the plight of humans on the move — but their storytelling methods vary. Some contributors explore personal experiences in their work, such as the muralist Guadalupe Maravilla, who migrated as a child from El Salvador to the United States in the 1980s during the Salvadoran civil war.

Others take a more detached and journalistic approach. The Irish artist Richard Mosse, for example, will show stills from his three-channel video installation, “Incoming,” which used aerial images captured with the same thermal, surveillance-camera technology militaries employ to track enemy activity on a battlefield. His haunting images, reduced to monochromatic shades, document the actual movement and encampments of human beings as they migrated from North Africa and the Middle East.

Another wide-angle approach comes from Ms. Kallat’s “Woven Chronicle,” a 50-foot-wide map of the world drawn with electrical cables; the piece has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The map articulates the shape of all seven continents in bright colors but overlays them with numerous additional wires designating major migratory routes over the centuries.

In this artist’s view of the planet, all of humanity is connected into a complicated web, woven by journeys across land and sea. The electrical wires are a metaphor, acting as both “conduit and barrier,” she said in an interview. “On one hand, they serve as channels of transmission and yet, on the other, their linear formations evoke barbed wires or different kinds of fencing.”