September 30, 2018–February 17, 2019
The Dallas Museum of Art presents Concentrations 61: Runo Lagomarsino, EntreMundos, the first US solo museum exhibition for the conceptual artist. On view September 30, 2018, through April 14, 2019, the exhibition is part of the Museum’s longstanding “Concentrations” series, which presents project-based solo exhibitions by international emerging artists. EntreMundos explores the unstable nature of national identities and myths through the transformation of everyday objects and phrases into historically referential works of art. By inverting and reconstituting markers of imperial influence and control, Lagomarsino points to the volatile relationship between power and geography.
Concentrations 61 spans two galleries and features new commissions and previous works specifically reconfigured for the DMA. The artist relies on quotidian materials—stamps, dinner plates, schoolroom maps—to question the ways in which notions of cultural belonging, and cultural difference, are constructed. He also incorporates photography, language, and historical works from the permanent collection in interventions that are both poetic and phenomenological. The subtitle of the exhibition, EntreMundos (“between worlds” in Spanish), evokes how Lagomarsino’s work evolves from a nuanced experience of migration in a global order driven by the constant movement of people and things.
“What I try to do in my work is construct frictions between language, iconography, and dominant narratives—frictions that connect these two spaces and times,” Lagomarsino explains. “My work is a search for fractures, for blind paths from where to tell other stories, from where to unlearn, and, particularly, from where to read the past and name the future… This means there has to be a change not only in content but also in the form in which the conversation is being held; new systems, new ways of narrating have to be produced.”
Born in Lund, Sweden, in 1977 to Argentinian parents descended from Italian émigrés, Runo Lagomarsino’s biography charts the very colonial histories that his work examines. Lagomarsino currently lives and works between Malmö, Sweden, and São Paulo, Brazil. He received a BFA from the Valand Academy, Gothenburg University in 2001, and an MFA from the Malmö Art Academy, Sweden, in 2003. He subsequently participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program, New York (2007–08). His work has been exhibited in group shows at the Guggenheim, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Prospect.4 New Orleans; and the Venice Biennale, among others.
Acknowledgements
Concentrations 61: Runo Lagomarsino, EntreMundos is organized by the Dallas Museum of Art and is curated by Dr. Anna Katherine Brodbeck, the Nancy and Tim Hanley Associate Curator of Contemporary Art. The exhibition is accompanied by a full-color illustrated brochure with an interview between the artist and exhibition curator. Additional support for the presentation is provided by the Contemporary Art Initiative and TWO X TWO for AIDS and Art, an annual fundraising event that jointly benefits amfAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research and the Dallas Museum of Art. The exhibition is included in the Museum’s free general admission.
