2013
HD video with sound
23 minutes 45 seconds
Variable installation
Notes From Underground connects the Stockholm metro and Susan Sontag’s sojourn in Sweden during the late 1960s, with a cavern system 5,000 miles away in New Mexico – not far from where the artist was raised. With Sontag as guide, the video takes a journey through geological time, through experiences of liminality. What’s discovered are persistent questions of violence, felt reverberating between strata of personal and cultural history.
The video was made between the Swedish general elections of 2010 and 2014, when the populist, anti-immigration party garnered enough votes to reach parliament for the first time since the party’s founding. Sontag’s voice reappears as a sound-wave, translating her words into the language of stalactites, a cardiograph, the path of a subway moving above and below the the surface of the earth. Distinct horizontal and vertical movements mingle with frequencies from the underground – and with the specter of Sontag. She answers a question posed to her on the cusp of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, not long before her own death: what should the artist’s role be in confronting a society’s ills?
Photo credit:
Jean-Baptiste Beranger
Constance Mensh
Åsa Lundén/Moderna Museet
Texts and interviews
Video creditslink / pdf
Lee, Mara. “The Shadow is Just as Tangible as the Origin.” Sunsets, Notes...,Waves. Archive Books, 2016.
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O'Neill-Butler, Lauren. “Time is a Dictator.” Sunsets, Notes...,Waves. Archive Books, 2016.
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Sadr Haghighian, Natascha. “Airport Hotel.” Sunsets, Notes...,Waves. Archive Books, 2016.
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Tan, Lisa. “Document of its Own Method.” Sunsets, Notes...,Waves. Archive Books, 2016.
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Tan, Lisa. For Every Word Has Its Own Shadow. Gothenburg: ArtMonitor, 2015. (PhD thesis)
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Wildt, Franziska. "Interview: Lisa Tan." Artblog Cologne. May 3, 2016.
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Martin Grennberger. "Interview: Lisa Tan," Kunstkrittik, Feb 24, 2015.
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O'Brien, Nicholas. "An interview with artist Lisa Tan." WAX magazine. Issue 7, Summer 2015.
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Tan, Lisa. Text for exhibition at Galleri Riis. Stockholm, Jan 14 - Feb 21, 2015.
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Exhibition History
Moderna Museet, The Collection, Stockholm, Oct 2020 - Oct 2021A symposium on the legacy of the writings by Susan Sontag, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, March 2018 (screening)
Notes From Underground, Kunsthall Trondheim, Norway, 2017
Sunsets, Notes From Underground, Waves, Galleri Riis, Oslo, 2016
Descent, Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia (ICA), Philadelphia, 2016
Wenden in den Geistes-, Sozial- und Kulturwissenschaften – Analysen, Reflexionen und Konsequenzen, Universität zu Köln, Cologne, 2016 (screening)
For every word has its own shadow, Galleri Riis, Stockholm, 2015
Just what is it that makes today so familiar, so uneasy?, Lofoten International Art Festival (LIAF), Lofoten, 2013