Lisa Tan joins as Professor of Fine Art with an emphasis on installation and text

“I am delighted to have Lisa Tan amongst our faculty and am sure that she will provide a significant resource for Konstfack’s development within the field of art. Not only is she an important artist and researcher, her interests and works evolve around questions on image, language and consciousness that add perfectly to our research and study environment,” says Maria Lantz, Vice-Chancellor at Konstfack.

Lisa Tan is an artist whose moving image, installation and text-based work often makes use of themes from literature and literary theory in order to ground questions that arise in the uncertain space between personal encounter, desire and rumination on particular histories. In her most recent project, Tan reconsiders Roland Barthes’ famous book on photography, Camera Lucida, in light of images of Mars taken from NASA’s mission with the Curiosity Rover. Drawing on her experience of growing up in a desert, she develops a poetics for earthbound existence, materialises history and distance, and questions the mothering of the planet against the ontology of the photograph in this technological, environmental, socio-political moment.

Together with Tan’s recent works, Waves (2014–15), Notes From Underground (2013) and Sunsets (2012), her practice engages with feminist materialist perspectives and methods. “I’ve been eschewing what is merely informational and categorisable and trying instead to speak at a register that is able to both represent and solicit the transformative margins of becoming. I think of art as a vehicle for intimacy. What might be felt in my work—more than a visible collection of images, words or objects in space—are the nuances of consciousness, identity and emotional limits in constant flux”. As a member of Konstfack’s faculty, she states: “I’d like to help shape an institution that develops and advocates for art and artistic knowledge that is furthered by wildly imaginative and experimental aesthetic strategies and discourse—as a matter of transformative life-sustaining sociality”.

Lisa Tan holds a PhD from the University of Gothenburg, Valand Academy and an MFA from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. From 2016–2018 she was Guest Professor of Fine Art at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. Sunsets, Notes From Underground, Waves (2015), a guidebook to Lisa Tan’s eponymous video suite is published by Archive Books, Berlin. Recent exhibitions include Notes From Underground (solo), Kunsthall Trondheim (2017); An Inventory of Shimmers, MIT List Center, Cambridge (2017); ever elusive, Transmediale Festival, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2017); Why Not Ask Again, the 11th Shanghai Biennale (2016); Surround Audience, New Museum, New York (2015). For further information see lisatan.net.

Konstfack is Sweden’s largest university of arts, crafts and design with undergraduate and graduate programmes in arts, crafts, design and visual arts/sloyd teacher education. All education programmes at Konstfack share a common artistic basis. The school was founded in 1844 and has currently 900 students and 200 staff members.