Artists' Film International 2020
June 6-21, 2020
Selected by Bonniers Konsthall
Whitechapel Gallery
London, UK



Bonniers Konsthall selected Lisa Tan's My Pictures of You for the 2020 installment of Whitechapel Gallery's Artists' Film International.

Artists’ Film International is a network of art institutions from around the world, first established in 2008 by the Whitechapel Gallery, London. From a selected theme, each participating institution chooses a film from an emerging artist. The theme for 2020 is Language.

In My Pictures of You (2017-19), Lisa Tan invites us to imagine that NASA photographs of the surface of Mars could be Earth, millions of years into the future, and devoid of life. The artist senses how the planet’s dry lake beds, undulating sand dunes, and horizon could be our own. Prompting speculation on climate change and extinction, we discover their striking familiarity as the film takes us on a road trip to the desert terrain of the American Southwest.

In intermittent sequences, Tan directly explores the relationship between image and language. She proposes an alternative reading of Camera Lucida, the influential 1980 text on photography by the literary theorist and philosopher Roland Barthes which pivots around a photograph of the author’s beloved late mother. In a thought-experiment, Tan changes Barthes meaning by switching words or imagining another word (or another picture) as she asks her reader, a lead researcher from the Mars expedition,  to replace the words mother and she with earth – Mother Earth.


Texts and interviews

“Artist Q&A: Lisa Tan.” Whitechapel Gallery Blog. May 6, 2020.
link / pdf