The catalogue of Lisa Tan's first institutional show in Sweden tenders its own spatial logic through the metaphor of neurological disorders.
Lisa Tan: Dodge and/or Burn is conceived as a continuation of the artist's eponymous solo exhibition at Accelerator gallery, Stockholm. Inspired by a drawing made by the famous neurologist Oliver Sacks representing the physiological organization of migraines, Tan created a system of "open walls" for viewers to navigate. Her attention to "the intersection between the nervous system and interior life as a way of examining how art operates, uncertainty, and the formation of the self" is deepened in the publication thanks to the essays of three authors whose work has affected Tan's thinking.
Psychoanalyst Charlotta Björklind and artist Asier Mendizabal analyze the overlapping of inner and outer life, the misalignment of subjective experience from representations of it, and negotiations between mind and brain, while the narration of writer Haytham el-Wardany meditates on the breath between words.
Throughout the book, at the top of the pages, runs a transcription of the voice-over monologue from Tan's video Dodge and Burn (2021–23).
Lisa Tan (born 1973 in Syracuse, NY, USA) is an artist and educator based in Stockholm. She works with video, photography, text, installation, and other gestures. Her own experiences of desire, loss and otherness, serve as drivers for explorations into consciousness, the formation of individual subjectivity, and the role that different representations play in shaping a person's relationship to the world and to others. She regularly draws from literature and the history of photography.
