“Dallas” curated by Margarita Kuleva, at the Carillon Gallery, Tarrant County Community College February 28th 2022
‘Dallas’ is an experimental exhibition on culture and representation, an homage to Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson and eponymous American TV-series (1978-1991). Currently, Kjartansson has been producing possibly the largest work for contemporary art in Russia in the recent years. For the newly established contemporary art center GES in Moscow, he re-shoots American soap opera Santa Barbara as ‘a fundamental part of the 1990s social and cultural landscape’ to ‘produce a collectively constructed, live history painting’. While his ‘Santa Barbara’ is taken out of context of its production (both in terms of time and space), my idea is to bring ‘Dallas’, equally important cultural phenomena for the post-Soviet Russia, back to Dallas as my experience of cultural imagination of Texas I have never visited before.
The collective show will be organized as cast of the TV series: the works of local artists impersonate certain characters and non-human participants of ‘Dallas’. Kjartansson’s work is taken as a source of inspiration, though the show shares some criticism of ‘Santa Barbara’: the gigantic living sculpture presents a form of luxury in the post-pandemic art world, more precarious then ever. On the contrary to the ‘titatic endeavor’ (GES, 2022), ‘Dallas’ chooses more intimate and small scale approach for reading culture and media in style of Soviet samodeyatelnost (diy-culture). The show aims to work critically with key themes of Dallas as capital, kinship and gender. - Maragarita Kuleva
Ewing Oil Headquarters, 1401 Elm St. Dallas, TX, 2022Oil-based enamel on wood and plaster
36” x 22” x 11 1/2”
