September 28 – December 21, 2017
Kunsthall Trondheim
Trondheim, Norway
The Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector wrote at dawn, searching for “whatever is lurking behind thought." Behind thought. Certainly then—also behind words?
Notes from Underground presents works by Lisa Tan (USA/Sweden). The exhibition contains a series of three films and two installation works, Moving a Mountain (2008) and National Geographic (2009), which precedes the films. Together they form a line of thinking and express the artist´s interest in liminality, in-between-ness.
Lisa Tan echoes Virginia Woolf´s intentions for the novel The Waves—to follow a rhythm rather than a plot. Her films Sunsets (2012), Notes From Underground (2013) and Waves (2014) contain, however distinctly edited, a floating element, something unstable and open. Guided by currents and undercurrents, they are constantly eluding you—subjects, histories and memories rise to the surface only to sink away again. Voices appear and are lost.
In Sunsets we hear Lispector´s voice from 1977 together with that of a friend of the artist´s, doing a translation over Skype, both searching for the right words, hesitating, uncertain. The language drifts. Maybe here, through the gap in and between languages, in this state of formlessness, we can briefly perceive what Lispector calls the “it” of the language.
While many subjects are touched upon in the films—violence, displacement, societal issues—the question that stays with you is maybe in the end that of artistic practice. What is this—to write, to make art? What kind of language could art speak? The films are in a way evolving in search of a possible practice. They stretch out over and beyond the globe, only to return to the artist´s working place—the desk, the computer screens, the everyday.
In this quest, Lisa Tan choses to follow Susan Sontag, Clarice Lispector and Virginia Woolf—Sontag’s refusal to reduce art to what could be explained, Lispector´s words about “the it” or “the is of the thing” or “whatever is lurking behind thought." And Woolf´s concern “with something else”—something else than literature, that is.
Thanks to Galleri Riis, Oslo.
Associated Events
Opening and artist conversation, Kunsthall Trondheim, Sept 28, 2017A conversation between author and essayist Tor Eystein Øverås and Konsthall Tronheim’s program curator Carl Martin Faurby on essays in art and litteratur in connection to Lisa Tan’s Notes from Underground, Kunsthall Trondheim, 15 Nov, 2017