Ways of knowing – SKH meets Konstfack

The seminar is part of the seminar series “Ways of knowing Spring 2025” where we every Wednesday this Spring is exploring how Ways of Knowing is manifesting in the field of artistic research right now. Read more about the seminar series and find upcoming seminars.

Lisa Tan.
Love and Rockets.

For this inter-institutional research engagement between Stockholm University of the Arts and Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design, artist and professor of Fine Art, Lisa Tan will engage with two ideas: the modesty of a hunch and the obsessional nature of a crush. These things can happen. What role can either feeling—hunch or crush—have for an artist during the preliminary stages of research and towards the realization of an artwork? Tan will explore this question with participants, drawing on how in her case, an intuitive set of feelings fueled a poetic exegesis on the intersection of neurobiology, coming to language, inner life and the mind-body in crisis.

Art, like illness—in its dissonance and suspension has the ability to transform the way we understand ourselves, our desires. – Lisa Tan

Tan will lead this conversation via the research she performed towards the making of her recent solo exhibition at Accelerator last year in Stockholm. Dodge and/or Burn was grounded in a single gesture in which the artist used an illustration-like graph describing migraine, drawn by the famed British neurologist, Oliver Sacks as the exhibition’s organizing principle. Lisa Tan will reveal aspects of her process and screen Dodge and Burn (2021-2023), a two-channel video installation that informed the exhibition’s title.

Participants of the seminar aiming to add more depth and context are encouraged to read an excerpt provided from Dodge and/or Burn, the publication released for the occasion of Tan’s exhibition at Accelerator, and chapter 3 from What Should We Do with Our Brain? by Catherine Malabou. Please contact john-paul.zaccarini@uniarts.se for the texts.

All are welcome.

Lisa Tan, Dodge and/or Burn at Accelerator (2023-2024). Photo: Jean-Baptiste Béranger

Lisa Tan is an artist living in Stockholm. She is Professor of Art at Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design. Born in Syracuse, Upstate New York, Tan was raised in El Paso, Texas, where her family settled, following their arrival to the States from Bangalore, India. Tan received an MFA from the University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles, where she lived for several years before moving to New York. 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), Tabakalera (San Sebastian), the New Museum (New York), the 11th Göteborg International Biennial of Contemporary Art (GIBCA) and the 11th Shanghai Biennale.. For more, see lisatan.net