Online Salon: Speculative Conversations Erika Tan in conversation with Kathleen Ditzig and Wenny Teo

Saturday 9 July 2022 | 1-3pm. All Welcome.

1pm (BST) Online Screening Barang-Barang: Spectral Entanglements

1.30pm (BST) Online Salon with Erika Tan, Kathleen Ditzig and Wenny Teo

Stanley Picker Gallery (Kingston University) and the Decolonising Art Institute (UAL) invite you to join us for the online premiere of Erika Tan’s Stanley Picker Fellowship commission Barang-Barang: Spectral Entanglements (2022) and the launch of the artist’s limited-edition publication Barang-Barang.

The online film screening will be followed by an unfolding speculative conversation between Erika Tan, National Gallery Singapore curator Kathleen Ditzig and art historian and writer Wenny Teo. Their conversation will focus on ideas of speculation in use as a form of methodology to unhinge and unsettle fixed notions of history and nation state boundaries, as well as to open up the possibilities of altering the status, resonance, value and interpretation of a work, or its reception.

The idea of a speculative encounter or entanglement runs central to the artist Erika Tan’s recent exhibition at the Stanley Picker Gallery, where four women artists (Georgette Chen (1906-1993), Kim Lim (1936-1997), Dora Gordine (1895-1991) and Erika’s mother, Fay Tan (1940-2005) are brought together in cinematic and imaginative space to ‘converse’. Interwoven into the project is the physical work of the artist’s mother’s estate and Tan’s own materials, artworks and ‘stuff’ or ‘barang’, which operates as a tool for thinking through and connecting sometimes the unexpected, forgotten, or invisible.

The conversation will also touch upon short texts each speaker has contributed to the associated publication and expand on these responses and ideas which meditate on art as ecology and family network’s histories and affinities as a feminist resistance of historical amnesia.

A recording of the conversation between Erika Tan, Kathleen Ditzig and Wenny Teo will be uploaded following the event.

Barang-Barang: Spectral Entanglements (2022) will be available to watch online for one week following the premiere. The Online Salon discussion will be available to watch on the Stanley Picker Gallery website and Decolonising Art Institute website from the end of July 2022.

Copies of the publication Barang-Barang (edition 50) are available directly through the Stanley Picker Gallery, priced incrementally from £15 to £75 as the edition is sold.

Biography

Kathleen Ditzig is based in Singapore and is a curator at the National Gallery Singapore and pursuing her Ph.D. at Nanyang Technological University. Her research interests include exhibitionary histories of Southeast Asia, global histories of capitalism and the enduring cultural legacies of the Cold War. She has presented Erika Tan’s work in recent curatorial projects such as Art Histories of a Forever War: Modernism between Space and Home (2021/2022) curated with Fang Tse Hsu at the Taipei Fine Art Museum and As The West Slept (2019), a Performa Consortium Project hosted and organised by Silver Art Projects in New York.

Wenny Teo is Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Art at The Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. Her research centres on layered histories of transnational encounter, geopolitics, ecology, infrastructure and speculative futures in Chinese and Sinophone visual cultures. She is currently preparing a monograph on the work of the Singapore-born British sculptor and printmaker Kim Lim (1936-1997), supported by a Paul Mellon Centre Mid-career Fellowship. Prior to joining faculty of the Courtauld, she worked in various curatorial positions at Tate Modern and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai. She has published essays and articles in numerous journals and catalogues, including Erika Tan’s Come cannibalise us why don’t you (2013) at the National University of Singapore Museum.

Erika Tan is an artist and curator whose research-led practice manifests in multiple formats including large installations, moving image, print, 3D works, publications, participatory and curatorial projects. Her research interests focus on the postcolonial and transnational, working with archival artefacts, exhibition histories, received narratives, contested heritage, subjugated voices and the transnational movement of ideas, people and objects. Tan was the Stanley Picker Fellow at Kingston University (2018) and is currently Reader of Contemporary Art Practice and MAFA Course Leader at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts, London, and an Associate Researcher with the Decolonising Art Institute, UAL in 2020-2022.