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19/3/2015

Carla Zaccagnini and Runo Lagomarsino

Malmo Konsthall, Malmo

Curated by: Diana Baldon and Nicola Lees

Malmö Konsthall is pleased to announce the first survey exhibition in Scandinavia of the internationally renowned artists Carla Zaccagnini and Runo Lagomarsino who live and work half of the year in Malmö and São Paulo.

Co-curated by Diana Baldon and Nicola Lees, and involving a display system designed by the artist Luca Frei, the exhibition presents a collection of works that reflects the trans-nationalism of the artists’ respective biographies. Lagomarsino was born in Lund to Argentinian parents of Italian descent who fled the country as political refugees in the mid-1970s. Zaccagnini was born in Buenos Aires to Argentinian parents (also of Italian descent) who immigrated to Brazil in 1981. This heritage materializes in both the focus of their post-conceptual practices as well as in the versatility of different artistic media with which they engage. Their works appear as effortless exercises on themes and histories that have had an impact on the perception of specific narratives inscribed in the fields of linguistics, geography, post-colonialism, the construction and representation of national identity and gender, art history as well as the discourse around the critique of institutional framing.

Zaccagnini’s Restauro: Almeida Júnior (2001) and Lagomarsino’s Stolen Light (2013) are pivotal works that articulate the logics of pairing, posing confrontations and resistances that reappear throughout the exhibition. Restauro is an extensive and yet ephemeral act of restoration orchestrated by Zaccagnini of an old portrait painting by Brazilian master Almeida Júnior. In the collection of the Coleção de Arte da Cidade São Paulo, the work is revered for its depiction of late nineteenth-century Brazilian light. Lagomarsino’s Stolen Light is a collection of used light bulbs stolen by the artist during several visits to Berlin’s Ethnological Museum. The piece sits in front of a gold leaf wall (Abstracto en Dorado, 2013), a motif recurring throughout Lagomarsino’s praxis and a direct reference to the consequences of the violent search by Spaniards for El Dorado. Whereas Zaccagnini’s works investigate, almost topographically, the surface of her topics to bring them back to light, Lagomarsino couples time to types of illumination (or their burnt traces) as materials of a formalist aesthetic production aimed at renegotiating all familiar expectations. They act as pseudo-neutral and yet authoritative witnesses to acts of migration, misplacement as well as brutality attached to the hegemonic history of the Western colonial project.

The selection of works in the exhibition is unified by a display and graphic system created by Luca Frei upon invitation of the artists. Five walls rotate diagonally between the columns of Malmö Konsthall’s distinctive architecture, shifting the gaze towards or away from the center of the gallery space. Their placement and considerable sizes draw attention to notions of movement and distance within Zaccagnini and Lagomarsino’s praxis. The chromatic features—red for the columns and beams; blue for the short side of the free-standing walls—set out to enhance the space in a different manner to how it is physically experienced until now, thus framing the exhibition as a dynamic entity able to join all works and walls into a specific and unique configuration.

A forthcoming exhibition catalogue with essays by Nataša Ilić and Rebecka Thor, published by Mousse Publishing, will be released at the end of May 2015.

Image: Left: Carla Zaccagnini, Restauro, 2001. Right: Runo Lagomarsino, Pergamon (A Place in Things), 2014.

Public relations officer
Lena Leeb-Lundberg +46 40-34 12 94 lena.leeb@malmo.se

Opening: Friday, March 20, 6–9 p.m.

Malmö Konsthall
S:t Johannesgatan 7
205 80 Malmö
Sweden
Hours: Thursday–Tuesday 11am–5pm,
Wednesday 11am–9pm
Free admission

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