13 Nov 2010

Runo Lagomarsino at the Centro de Artes Visuais in Coimbra, Portugal

The Visual Arts Centre in Coimbra, Portugal is presenting “The G in Modernity Stands For Ghosts”, an exhibition by Runo Lagomarsino. This is show is a part of the “Project Room” programme, organized by guest curator Miguel Amado, which has already included exhibitions by Rä di Martino and Katarina Zdjelar, among other artists. This exhibition brings together six works that examine the ideological apparatus that support the political, economic and cultural power through the lenses of the north-south relationship in the post-colonial context.

Coimbra, November 1st – The Visual Arts Centre in Coimbra, Portugal is presenting “The G in Modernity Stands For Ghosts”, an exhibition by Runo Lagomarsino. This is show is a part of the “Project Room” programme, organized by guest curator Miguel Amado, which has already included exhibitions by Rä di Martino and Katarina Zdjelar, among other artists. This exhibition brings together six works that examine the ideological apparatus that support the political, economic and cultural power through the lenses of the north-south relationship in the post-colonial context.

Lagomarsino’s practice addresses the representations of the Other, both on an iconographic and discursive level, which are the bases for the civilisational predominance of Europe, and later on of North America, over the other areas of the planet. For example, in the exhibition “Las Casas Is Not A Home”, held in 2009 2008-10, he examined the action of evangelisation as a morally justified strategy of identity formation inspired by the “Valladolid Controversy” of 1550-51, in which the Dominican priest Bartolomé de Las Casas opposed the philosopher Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda in a pioneering debate about the status of the indigenous population of the American continent. An early work like Notion of Conflict, Dance of the Piñata (2004) already focused on this issue in evoking the oppression of South American natives by European colonisers through a popular game, the “piñata”, which was used as a tool for domestication under the moral cover of Christianisation. Lagomarsino thus explores the development model of western societies based on historical processes of a colonial nature, as well as the symbolic practices of resistance that this dynamic has generated over the centuries.

In this exhibition, Lagomarsino also reflects upon geographical thought as a scientific programme that naturalises an unequal correlation of forces among peoples on the planetary scale. The video The G in Modernity Stands for Ghosts (2009), which lends its title to the show, consists of pieces of crumbled paper burning inside a little cardboard box; these elements were previously cut out from an atlas and refer to uninhabited regions on Earth, and their slow combustion, which is a metaphor for ritualistic death, forms an allegory for the act of destruction to which human beings subject any deserted territory. This matter is also dealt with in a work like This Wall Has No Image but It Contains Geography (2010), which consists of this expression written on a bare white wall. Lagomarsino speculates on an erased cartography, the exercise of which would give way to an awareness of the impossibility of its own existence as an instrument of ordering the social fabric. This problematic is expanded in Magic and Loss (2010), a poster given out free to the visitors and which reproduces the palm of a hand on which there is a cork pierced at different points and which evokes the map of South America.

The work If You Don't Know What the South Is, It’s Simply Because You Are From the North (2008) operates in the space between the ideal of universality and the logics of exclusion that the Nation-State institution bore with it. This is a sculpture in the form of text that comments on the pre-notions underlying the understanding of the dividing of the Earth into different parts, with each one corresponding to different stages of development, of which the expression “Third World”, associated to the south, is the best example. Contratiempos (2009-10), which is conceptually in tune with this latter work, is an installation with two components: on the one hand a slide projection illustrating a search for the outline of the South American continent within the gaps in the pavement linking the buildings of the Ibirapuera Park in Sao Paulo (designed by Oscar Niemeyer and Roberto Burle Marx in the post-World War Two period); on the other hand, three postcards reproducing the covers of three books related to the Spanish Civil War and the sovietization of Russia stored in the library in the Casa das Canoas, Niemeyer’s residence that he built for himself in the 1950s. This is a work that refers to a subjective experience of a rationalist, modern reality, and simultaneously proposes an emancipated reading of the position occupied by the south in the transnational public sphere, a prototype for a utopian citizenship that would equate countries to one another independently of their capacity to affirm themselves in the global arena.

Runo Lagomarsino was born in Lund, Sweden, in 1977, and lives and works in Sao Paulo and Malmo. He studied Visual Arts at the Academy of Fine Art Valand, in Gothenburg, at the Malmo Art Academy and at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, in New York City. He has exhibited regularly since the beginning of the 2000s. Of note among his recent solo exhibitions are: “Between an Imperial System and a Metric System” (Elastic, Artissima, Turin, 2010); “Horizon (Southern Sun Drawing”) (Elastic, Zona Maco, Mexico City, 2010); “Las Casas is Not a Home” (Mummery + Schnelle, London, 2009); “Those Who Control the Past Command the Future – Those Who Command the Future Conquer the Past (Overgaden, Copenhagen, 2007); This Is No Time for Saluting Flags (Elastic, Malmo, 2006). Recent group exhibitions include “The Moderna Exhibition 2010” (Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 2010; “The Travelling Show” (Colección Jumex, Mexico City, 2010); “Free as Air and Water” (Cooper Union, New York, 2009); “Report on Probability” (Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, 2009); 2ª Trienal Poli/Gráfica de San Juan (2009); Luleå Biennial (2009); “Ours: Democracy in the Age of Branding” (Parsons The New School for Design, New York, 2008); 7ª Gwangju Biennial (2008); 3ª Guangzhou Triennial (2008).


For further information, please contact Catarina Portelinha on the e-mail catarinaportelinha@cav-ef.net or call +351239836930.