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Gasworks presents the first UK solo exhibition by New York-based artist
Lana Lin.
Since the early 1990s, Lin has developed a rich
body of film and video work dealing with processes of identification and
the politics of translation. Her practice is largely informed by
experimental and documentary filmmaking and raises questions about the
implications of media representation—and the sense of estrangement it
can produce—for an understanding of constructs such as language,
nationality and cultural identity.
This exhibition presents
three of the artist's key works from the 1990s and early 2000s. Often
concerned with Lin's relationship to her Taiwanese cultural heritage, these
films speculate on the problems of translation across
cultures—whether between the so-called East and West, or between our
world and other worlds.
Stranger Baby (1995) is a 16mm
mock science fiction film that explores what it means to be normal or
considered 'alien.' We see a woman haunted by an androgynous apparition and
curious faces flickering on a television screen. This is overlaid with a
soundtrack composed of viewers' speculations on the film's images. Their
conflicting responses, marked by anxiety, reveal ready-made and often
racially driven assumptions.
The 4-channel video installation
Mysterial Power (1998–2002) documents the struggle of the
artist as both an observer of, and participant in, the daily routines and
religious practices of her Taiwanese family. Inspired by Lin's adolescent
cousin—who is believed to be able to communicate with a Taiwanese
god—this work focuses on the figure of the spiritual medium as a
translator between different realms of experience: the everyday and the
supernatural. Mediating between the strange and familiar, she offers a
shifting vantage point from which to view cultural constructions of belief
and knowledge.
Taiwan Video Club (1999) introduces an
underground world of television piracy in Taiwan. The protagonists record
and trade videotapes of their favourite 'epics', broadcast daily on
television. Focusing on their fanaticism and the materiality of the
recording process, this video draws a connection between electronic and
cultural forms of translation.
Events
Wednesday 17 October, 7pm
Screening: Unidentified Vietnam
No. 18 (Lin+Lam, 2007, 16mm, 30min), followed by a discussion
between the artists and critic and curator Simon Sheikh.
Unidentified Vietnam No. 18 is a response to seventeen films
held in the collection of the Library of Congress in Washington, DC,
labelled only as “Unidentified Vietnam, #1-17.” The film
examines the contested relationship between Vietnam and the U.S., nation
building and democracy, history and propaganda. We hear an historian, film
scholar, and South Vietnamese-in-exile speculate upon the intention of
these salvaged images, reminding us of what remains unidentifiable in the
process of recovery.
Wednesday 7 November, 7pm
Screening: Almost the Cocktail Hour (Lana Lin,
1997, 16mm, 56min) followed by a discussion between the artist and lecturer
in film Maxa Zoller.
Almost the Cocktail Hour is an experimental biography
of writer Jane Bowles, who was one of the more eccentric characters of the
art salon scene of New York and North Africa in the 1940s and '50s, as well
as an expatriate, lesbian, alcoholic, and wife of the more celebrated
writer and composer Paul Bowles.
Please visit www.gasworks.org.uk
for further information.
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