MALMO.- Malmö Konsthall announces 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 transnationalism 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 mid1970s. 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 postconceptual 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 taken 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.

Carla Zaccagnini was born in 1973 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She received her BFA in 1995 from the Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado in São Paulo. She also received an MA in Visual Poetics from the Universidade de São Paulo in 2004. She has held solo exhibitions at the Museu de Arte da Pampulha, Belo Horizonte (2002); Museu Victor Meirelles, Florianópolis (2005); Art Gallery of York University, Toronto (2008). She has participated in group shows at Museu de Arte Moderna, São Paulo (2001, 2008, 2009, and 2013); Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (2004); Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, Miami (2006); Fundación Jumex, Mexico City (2010); Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro (2002, 2011); Guggenheim Museum, New York (2014); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2014–2015). She has taken part in the São Paulo Bienal (2008); Trienale Poli/Gráfica de San Juan (2009, 2012); 8th Berlin Biennale (2014).

Runo Lagomarsino was born in 1977 in Lund. received a BFA in 2001 from the Valand Academy of Arts at the University of Gothenburg, and an MFA from the Malmö Art Academy in 2003. He subsequently participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program, New York (2007–2008). Lagomarsino has held solo exhibitions at ar/ge kunst Galerie Museum, Bolzano (2011); Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm (2012); Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo (2013); Nils Staerk, Copenhagen (2014). He has been featured in the group exhibitions at Lunds Kunsthall (2007); Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, New York (2009); Basis voor Actuele Kunst, Utrecht (2010); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2010); Guggenheim Museum, New York (2014); Kadist Art Foundation, Paris, and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2014–2015). He also participated in the Guangzhou Triennial and Gwangju Biennial (both 2008); the Venice Biennale, Istanbul Biennial, and Prague Biennial (2011); the São Paulo Biennial (2012). In 2014 he was the recipient of the Barbro and Holger Bäckström Award. Runo Lagomarsino will also participate in the 2015 Venice Biennale.