2014-2015
HD video with sound
19 minutes 23 seconds
Variable installation
Departing from Virginia Woolf’s experimental novel The Waves, the video Waves imagines how consciousness forms in relation to society and its technologies but also to expressions of geological and hydrological processes. Filmed at the threshold of land and sea, a conversation forms between disparate hydro-relations, such as Woolf’s prose, Courbet’s paintings of waves, Google’s data centers cooled by the Baltic Sea, invisible jellyfish, and transoceanic cables.
In Waves viewers see and hear the video’s script as it is being written on a computer, an object which also acts as a vehicle in the work for materializing distance and the passage of time. Through the activity of searching for Courbet’s paintings of waves on Google Cultural Institute, the artist (and by extension the viewer) is connected to a data center outside of Helsinki. The servers are cooled with water from the Baltic Sea— creating a nearly unfathomable relationship between looking at The Wave online, and that of Courbet’s own looking in 1869, as he painted an image whose digital dissemination would entail the force of the sea he depicted.
Photo credit:
Jean-Baptiste Beranger
Texts
Video creditslink / pdf
Lee, Mara. “The Shadow is Just as Tangible as the Origin.” Sunsets, Notes...,Waves. Archive Books, 2016.
link / pdf
O'Neill-Butler, Lauren. “Time is a Dictator.” Sunsets, Notes...,Waves. Archive Books, 2016.
link / pdf
Sadr Haghighian, Natascha. “Airport Hotel.” Sunsets, Notes...,Waves. Archive Books, 2016.
link / pdf
Tan, Lisa. “Document of its Own Method.” Sunsets, Notes...,Waves. Archive Books, 2016.
link / pdf
Tan, Lisa. For Every Word Has Its Own Shadow. Gothenburg: ArtMonitor, 2015. (PhD thesis)
link / pdf
Wildt, Franziska. "Interview: Lisa Tan." Artblog Cologne. May 3, 2016.
link / pdf
Martin Grennberger. "Interview: Lisa Tan," Kunstkrittik, Feb 24, 2015.
link / pdf
O'Brien, Nicholas. "An interview with artist Lisa Tan." WAX magazine. Issue 7, Summer 2015.
link / pdf
Tan, Lisa. Text for exhibition at Galleri Riis. Stockholm, Jan 14 - Feb 21, 2015.
link / pdf
Exhibition History
On the Pulse of the Water, Skånes Konstförening, 2023MOMENT II | WAVES, Shimmer at the Goethe Institut, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, March 4, 2018 (screening)
Tertulia, Index Foundation, Stockholm, Jan 25, 2018 (screening)
Notes From Underground, Kunsthall Trondheim, Norway, 2017
Show and Tell, Malmö Konstmuseum, Malmö, 2017-2018
An Inventory of Shimmers: Objects of Intimacy in Contemporary Art, MIT List Visual Art Center (LIST), Cambridge, 2017
ever elusive, Transmediale, Berlin, Feb 5, 2017 (screening)
Why Not Ask Again?, 11th Shanghai Biennale, 2016
Sunsets, Notes From Underground, Waves, Galleri Riis, Oslo, 2016
Strange Oscillations and Vibrations of Sympathy, Art Galleries of Illinois State, University, 2016
Wenden in den Geistes-, Sozial- und Kulturwissenschaften – Analysen, Reflexionen und Konsequenzen, Universität zu Köln, Cologne, 2016 (screening)
The net the accidents collect, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), Los Angeles, April 17, 2016 (screening)
Unlimited, Black Box 2.0 Film festival, Seattle, May 21-24, 2015 (screening)
Psychic Geographies, lothringer13_florida, Munich, May 31, 2015 (screening)
Surround Audience, Triennial, New Museum, New York, 2015
For every word has its own shadow, Galleri Riis, Stockholm, 2015