24 March – 25 May 2012
Galerie VidalCuglietta
Brussels, Belgium
Galerie VidalCuglietta is pleased to present the new solo exhibition of the Stockholm and New York-based American artist Lisa Tan.
For this exhibition, the artist debuts a new single-channel video installation titled Sunsets (2012). Sunsets documents an informal translation and transcription (Portuguese to English) of a 1977 interview with the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector (1920-1977). Lispector’s figurative and highly imaginative sto- ries approach the limits of subjectivity in remarkable ways. In Sunsets, Tan layers the interview with a seductive and melancholic visual language to address values of productivity and passivity in relation to creation.
Lisa Tan has been spending a lot of time in Sweden for the past few years, and anecdotally relates the origin of this piece:
...it relies on the most banal topic, something that I thought you really shouldn’t talk about anywhere, but especially at certain latitudes because its presence is so achingly obvious: the weather. Or really, it’s about the light.
The footage in the video was shot in Sweden at either 3am during the summer, or at 3pm during the winter. I look at this liminal zone, when it’s not really day or night, or when the sun sets too slowly or too rapidly, as a way of connecting to certain values of productivity and the generative liminal space of translation—of not knowing exactly—or of getting things wrong. So last summer, I woke up in the mid- dle of the night, when I was supposed to be sleeping, when the sleep function on my laptop showed slowly shifting views of our solar system, insisting that I was not supposed to be working, no. I started filming my laptop in this mode, thinking that right now, the computer is perhaps most interesting when it’s asleep.
Lisa Tan’s works involve her longstanding interest in persistent ontological questions, and different ex- periences of loss and longing. Her work is known for an elegant visual economy and has taken the form of photographs, videos, sculptures, drawings, installations, and writing. Another work on view, Moving a Mountain, first exhibited in New York in 2008, relates a night spent in Mexico City—its quiet discover- ies and future traces. The piece consists of a found painting, a photograph and a framed text.