Concentrations 61: Runo Lagomarsino, EntreMundos / Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX, 2018
Press release/ September 30 – February 17
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.”