Carla Zaccagnini. the mahi-mahi effect

Lunds konsthall is happy to present the largest solo exhibition in Europe to date by Malmö-based Argentinian-Brazilian artist Carla Zaccagnini.

18/09/25

11:51

They say it is called mahi-mahi, the fish we caught. When it was coming out of the water, it was bright blue and yellow. It had a shiny blue dorsal fin, a very pointed tail and a yellow or golden body with blue spots. But the blue turned grey very quickly. It loses its colour, said the captain. But I don't know if it loses its colour because it is out of the water or if it loses its colour when it loses its life. I don't know if it is the contact with the salt water that makes this vibrant colour appear or if it is part of its vital functions: while it breathes, it glows.

Lunds konsthall is happy to present the largest solo exhibition in Europe to date by Malmö-based Argentinian-Brazilian artist Carla Zaccagnini.

The core of the exhibition is a series of new works produced during a month-long trip across the Atlantic: between September 17 and October 15 last year, Zaccagnini travelled in a tall ship from Cascais, in the south of Portugal, to Fernando de Noronha, an archipelago situated in the east coast of Brazil. Beyond its physical dimension, the trip was consciously conceived as an affective, epistemic and counterpedagogical journey, an experience that came to permeate the exhibition as a whole.

These new productions share a performatic imprint, and are put in dialogue with older works by Zaccagnini. In this way, the exhibition highlights some of the recurrent themes and artistic strategies that articulate her conceptually-driven practice. Through drawing, video installation and writing, Zaccagnini investigates non eurocentric perceptions of time and space, as well as the transformative potential embedded in displacement and translation.

Curator: Jari Malta

Zaccagnini’s trip sparks from roda—soft water on hard stone, an interdisciplinary project developed with curator Katarina Stenbeck.