January 14 - February 21, 2015
Galleri Riis
Stockholm, Sweden
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
Texts
Lee, Mara. “On the work of Lisa Tan.” commissioned by Galleri Riis, 2015link / pdf
Tan, Lisa. Text for exhibition at Galleri Riis. Stockholm, Jan 14 - Feb 21, 2015.
link / pdf