Announcements

For the upcoming 2026 edition of Los Encuentros de Palmplona, Lisa Tan leads a conversation with Hito Steyerl around the filmmaker’s recent book Medium Hot (Verso Books, 2025), October 9.

Returning to Bard MFA as a Visiting Artist, with a lecture on June 22 at 1:00-2:30 pm and a screening on June 23 at 5:30-6:30 pm, both in the Ottoway Theater.
Photo: Jenny Källman

National Geographic (Epoch), Galleri Riis, Oslo. February 19 – March 27, 2026.

Lisa Tan’s Waves (2015) included in Correspondence at François Ghebaly, Los Angeles, August 2 - September 10, 2025

The Extracurriculars: Lisa Tan on Mike Kelley, Ghost and Spirit at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, August 29, 2025, 17:30-18:30.

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Biography

Lisa Tan traces the contours of life as it is shaped by desire and determined by the contingent encounters that form it. To do this, she draws from an array of references: the biographical details of a literary figure, a neurological condition, a troubling encounter between strangers, a natural phenomenon. Her process is initiated by an intuitive sense for how a situation or question, that is personal in nature, can also be an apt methodological device to analyze the complexities of subjectivity, language, and inner life. Tan’s work takes the form of installation, photography, video, and writing, among other gestures. Marked by material and conceptual precision, it considers the frame and conditions in which it appears and meets an audience in a manner that often engenders the work itself with its physical features and content.

Lisa Tan lives in Stockholm, Sweden. She is Professor of Art at Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design, and visiting faculty at Bard MFA in upstate New York. Born in Syracuse, New York, Tan was raised in El Paso, Texas, where her family settled. Tan received an MFA from the University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles, where she lived for several years before moving to New York. In 2012, she relocated to Sweden to undertake a practice-based PhD at HDK-Valand at the University of Gothenburg.

Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions at institutions such as Moderna Museet (Stockholm), Kunstinstituut Melly (Rotterdam), MIT List Center (Cambridge), Kunsthall Trondheim, Whitechapel Gallery (London), ICA Philadelphia, Kadist Art Foundation (Paris), Tabakalera (San Sebastian), Contemporary Art Gallery CAG (Vancouver), Artists Space (New York), Accelerator (Stockholm), Lunds konsthall. Tan’s work was presented in the 11th Göteborg International Biennial of Contemporary Art (GIBCA) (2021), osloBIENNALEN First Edition (2019-2020), ever elusive, Transmediale festival, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (2017), Why Not Ask Again?, the 11th Shanghai Biennale (2016), Surround Audience, the Triennial exhibition at the New Museum (2015). Her work is in the collections of Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Malmö Konstmuseum, the City of Oslo’s public art collection, Coleção Moraes-Barbosa, São Paulo, and Artium the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Basque Country, Vitoria-Gasteiz.

Lisa Tan: Dodge and/or Burn, available from Mousse Publishing, was conceived as a continuation of the artist’s eponymous solo exhibition at Accelerator, Stockholm (2023-2024). It includes texts by psychoanalyst Charlotta Björklind, artist Asier Mendizabal, writer Haytham el-Wardany, Accelerator’s exhibition curator Therese Kellner and artistic director Richard Julin. Throughout the book runs a transcription of the voice-over monologue from Tan’s video Dodge and Burn.

Sunsets, Notes From Underground, and Waves, an artist book on Lisa Tan’s series of videos from 2012-2015, is published by and available at Archive Books, Berlin. It was designed and edited by Joshua Shaddock, and features texts by Mara Lee, Lauren O’Neill-Butler, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, and Lisa Tan.

For full-length viewing copies of Lisa Tan's videos please email the studio address in Contact.

Curriculum vitae
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Artist portraits
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