Contents
Biography, Contact information, News
Archive, Sunsets, Notes From Underground, Waves
Texts, Reviews, Published projects
Biography
Curriculum vitae, PDF (80 KB)
Born in 1973 in Syracuse, NY, USA, Lisa Tan lives in Stockholm where she is Professor of Fine Art at Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design. She works with video, photography, text, and installation. Tan is concerned with the ways in which images and language shape political consciousness, the formation of individual subjectivity, and desire. Aspects of her everyday life—such as love, experiences of otherness, loss—have all served as inspiration alongside her research into different fields of study such as theory of photography, literature, and affect.
In a series of video works, Sunsets (2012), Notes From Underground (2013), and Waves (2014-15), Tan draws from the enigmatic writers Clarice Lispector, Susan Sontag, and Virginia Woolf. Female consciousness becomes a guide to the various worlds figured within each work. The videos illuminate creative life and ponder how to exist with others given the sharply angled urgencies of our time. For instance, in Waves, Tan plays off of Woolf’s experimental novel, The Waves, filming and writing as a way to grasp distances and to try to make some sense of material reality in the digital age. In another more recent work titled My Pictures of You (2017-19), Tan thinks about images of Mars together with Roland Barthes’ writing on photography as vehicles to solve a riddle about death and the future. The act becomes an unlikely, joyful affirmation of earthbound existence.
Lisa Tan is represented by Galleri Riis (Oslo). She is currently included in osloBIENNALEN First Edition 2019-2024 with a work titled, Other Artists (2019). Recent exhibitions include a solo exhibition at Kunsthall Trondheim (2017), and the group exhibitions, An Inventory of Shimmers, MIT List Center (2017), Show and Tell, Malmö Konstmuseum (2017), Why Not Ask Again?, 11th Shanghai Biennale (2016), Decent, ICA Philadelphia (2016), Surround Audience, Triennial exhibition at the New Museum (2015). Her work is included in the public collections of Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Malmö Konstmuseum, the City of Oslo’s public art collection, and Coleção Moraes-Barbosa, São Paulo.
Lisa Tan’s artist book Sunsets, Notes From Underground, and Waves, is published by and available at Archive Books, Berlin.
Full-length viewing copies of Lisa Tan's videos can be
obtained by sending a blank email to this address
Contact information
Lisa Tan Studio
117 66 Stockholm, Sweden
+46 70 883 57 95
Arbins gate 7
0253 Oslo, Norway
+47 22 94 40 40
News
Upcoming screening, My Pictures of You, Artists' Film International 2020 initiated by Whitechapel Gallery at Bonniers Konsthall, January 2020
Review in Kunstkritikk of solo exhibition at Galleri Riis, Oslo, October 17-November 10, 2019 (PDF 394 KB)
Film i Samtidskonsten. Screening of Lisa Tan's trilogy at Biocafé Tellus, Stockholm, November 19, 2019, 19:00
Lisa Tan participates in olsoBIENNALEN First Edition 2019-2024. Read about her contribution in "Take the Stairs" by Josh Shaddock. PDF (104 KB)
On Photography, A Symposium on the Legacy of Susan Sontag at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, April 20, 2018
Speakers: David Campany, London, Susie Linfield, New York, Anna-Kaisa Rastenberger, Helsinki and Lisa Tan, Stockholm.
Über Leben conference at Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), April 26-28, 2018
The conference will consider what it means to live as an artist today, taking in both pragmatic aspects (überleben—to survive) and philosophical reflections (über Leben—about life). Guests include Tizza Covi & Rainer Frimmel, Verena Dengler, Diedrich Diederichsen, Jürg Egli, Matthieu Laurette, Elizabeth Lebon, Thomas Locher, Martina Mächler, Angela McRobbie, Rosalie Schweiker & San Keller, Christine Streuli, Lisa Tan, Übermorgen (Lizvlx & Hans Bernhard), and Carey Young.
Back to top