For every word has its own shadow

January 14 - February 21, 2015

 

Galleri Riis

Rödbodtorget 2

Stockholm, Sweden

www.galleririis.com

 

 

These days I live in Stockholm. A place surrounded by water. So I think about the desert a lot. I grew up in one. As a child, the high elevation would set off repeated murder scene-like nosebleeds. I'd lie flat on the kitchen floor waiting for the metallic flavor to stop coating my throat. Now that I think about it, I realize it's that same kitchen floor where I first discovered mercury from a broken thermometer.

 

Mercury is a transition metal. This has something to do with oxidation states and loss of electrons, but I just want to fixate on the idea that transitions, by definition, exist inside processes of change. They're in between phases, gaps in classification.

 

The three videos in my exhibition try to give form to the liminal. They narrate my own process of trying to gauge distances of all sorts. I'm probably homesick, yes. But my work is also part of a long chain of experiments that try to make visible the complex processes of consciousness - that unfold in relation to experience and language. Adorno wrote admiringly of Benjamin, "[his] thoughts press close to its object, seek to touch it, smell it, taste it and so thereby transform itself" (Prisms, 240).

 

In the videos, which were made over a period of nearly four years, I speak through - and have conversations with - enigmatic writers, with close friends, with histories still felt, and with technologies and geographies that I know - in order to mediate those that I don't. I've filmed in places and at times that exist at some threshold. Like where sea meets land, and while traversing above and below the surface of the earth, and during the time when day gives way to night.

 

- Lisa Tan, Stockholm, January 6, 2015

 

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Galleri Riis and Lisa Tan are delighted to present a commissioned text by the Swedish writer and poet Mara Lee. Printed copies will be available at the gallery. For a pdf version, click here.

 

Works on view: Waves (2014), 19 minutes, Notes from Underground (2013), 23 minutes, Sunsets (2012), 22 minutes.

 

Psychic Geographies | long-distance screening

31 May, from 4 pm

 

Elise Florenty & Marcel Türkowsky, Arvo Leo, Laure Prouvost, Lis Rhodes, John Smith

Lisa Tan, Agnes Varda, Jennifer West

 

lothringer13_florida

Lothringer Straße 13

81667 München, Germany

www.lothringer13florida.org

 

 

 

Als Teil des Programms Psychic Geographies untersucht das Screening Mittel der Wegweisung, von dokumentarischen Ortserkundungen über Bildschirmnavigation zur Materialität des filmischen Mediums als eigenständig flanierendes und transformatives Mittel. Während des Filmmarathons gibt es Essen und Getränke.

 

As part of Florida’s programme Psychic Geographies this screening explores methods of navigation, from travel accounts to screen navigation to the materiality and process of film as a journeying and transformative device in its own right.

During the film marathon food and drinks will be available.

 

in Kooperation mit / in cooperation with: dem Fahrenden Raum, Kultur und Spielraum e.V.

 

 

Black Box 2.0 Film Festival

Unlimited

May 6 - June 7, 2015

 

 

This program presents large-scale installations throughout the festival:

Gillian Wearing, WE ARE HERE (2014), Phil Collins, TOMORROW IS ALWAYS TOO LONG (2014)

Lisa Tan, WAVES (2014-2015), Knut Åsdam, EGRESS (2013), Sue de Beer, THE GHOSTS (2011)

 

curated by Anne Couillaud and Julia Fryett

 

Raisbeck Performance Hall

2015 Boren Ave

Seattle, WA 98121

 

 

Today cinema is everywhere and nowhere. Montage, the simple act of editing a scene, has become a universal tool for generating reality. The participatory, networked culture in which we live is now an entangled web of jump cuts, swipes and likes. Social media allow us to direct and stage our own lives. Surveillance reimagines personal, professional and biological narratives. Our obsession with innovation generates an infinite, and increasingly opaque, stream of data. The ambiguous cinematic landscape that is unfolding challenges our very ideas about what art is and what art can be.

 

As black box theory suggests, art makes the invisible, visible. Emerging technologies and digital culture are reformatting our consciousness and our cognitive capacities, our entire being. Our experiences of simultaneity, dispersion and juxtaposition have intensified. The artists of Black Box 2.0 embrace available tools to question the unknowns of our epoch. Many invoke pop as a carrier symbol, bringing art into our daily life through the platforms that surround us. The social and psychological consequences of technology are often either implied or revealed. In some works, the line between fiction and nonfiction vanishes, leading to new forms of narration. In others, the blending of the virtual and the physical is (re)presented and questioned. The changes in the genealogy of the sensitive, desire, the organization of dreams, and the invention of new forms of autonomy are themes and ideas fueling the works presented throughout the festival.

 

Black Box 2.0 is designed to explore the vigorous chaos of cinema. An international spectrum of artists are exhibited in industrial shipping containers, white cube galleries, black box movie theaters, your living room, and a building on the verge of destruction. Landscapes and stories are revisited, spaces are inhabited, and experiments are carried out. There is no map for this place.

 

What is a black box? black box, noun, is a widely used term that refers to many things: movie theaters, transistors, flight recorders, algorithms, the human brain. It is also an abstract theory that relies on observable inputs and outputs to define the invisible functions of a device, network or object. The box is “black” because the opaque facade obstructs visibility. In an artistic context, black boxes provide a method of exploring systems of the unknown which are widely accepted by society - particularly the social, political, ethical, and aesthetic implications concealed within a culture increasingly shaped by technology. Black boxes make the invisible, visible.

 

blackboxing, verb, is described by Bruno Latour as “the way scientific and technical work is made invisible by its own success. When a machine runs efficiently, when a matter of fact is settled, one need focus only on its inputs and outputs and not on its internal complexity. Thus, paradoxically, the more science and technology succeed, the more opaque and obscure they become.”

 

 

Anne Couillaud, Independent Curator

Julia Fryett, Founder of Aktionsart