Lisa 
Tan

Dodge and Burn
2021-23
two-channel video installation with a single-channel video version
30 minutes (installation) / 20 minutes (screening)
Variable dimensions
Edition 5 + 1 AP


It begins with a blunder, “I pressed stop instead of record.” The mishap occurs during the first of three, consecutive attempts the artist made to film fireworks on the 4th of July, from the vantage point of a passenger on a commercial airliner destined for Los Angeles International Airport. Through this evasion, she discovers how an image refusing capture reveals far more in its absence.

Witnessed from inside the muffled interior of an airplane, fireworks seen from this position look a lot like an image of war. If this is her initial, facile observation, it is troubled by the fact that moments before landing, every plane destined for Los Angeles, descends directly over neighborhoods where the militarization of the police in America was actively developed in the 1960s and where the first SWAT team was deployed. Making a connection between this history and its immanent affects, she attempts to capture the scene inside of the destructive years of the Trump presidency.

By the time the shot evades her for the third time, a different kind of violence comes to the fore. The visible shuffles place with the invisible. And we are taken on a journey that reaches for the role of images in a time of visual and information overload, sensing how forms of violence are ever more frequently self-inflicted under prevailing structures, including the condition of burnout, troubling the established limits of representation.


Photo credit:
Jean-Baptiste Béranger


Exhibition History

Dodge and/or Burn, Accelerator, Stockholm, 2023-2024

Dodge and Burn, The Athenaeum, Athens, GA, 2022