The Looking-Glass Dialogues: Lisa Tan and Lisa Torell on Art in the Academy

This series of talks takes its guiding metaphor from The Looking Glass in Lewis Carroll’s novel with the same name: a portal between two worlds, where one can seem surreal from the point of view of the other. The two worlds under discussion here are the one of higher education and art: both with their accompanying institutional and cultural frameworks.

Artistic research, both as an intellectual field and as a funding stream, has been intensely debated in the Swedish media, with a particularly sharp exchange of views last spring. The field is relatively new, and it has often been defined institutionally rather than primarily from the perspective of artists.

As the first Centre of Excellence dedicated to artistic research in Sweden, CAPIm has the responsibility to help create a platform for a complex, grounded iteration of this debate among artistic researchers. The Looking-Glass Dialogues intends to begin this work.  

Lisa Tan and Lisa Torell are both highly regarded artists whose practices engage political urgencies through form, material process, and with long-term, contingent research. They are also respected participants in the institutional field of artistic research in Scandinavia – Lisa Tan within the research environment at Konstfack and Lisa Torell in her work at Tromsø Academy of Art in Norway and new role on the Committee for Artistic Research at the Swedish Research Council. Together, they are uniquely placed to reflect on what happens to an artist’s research process when it enters the academy, and how the academy might change to accommodate that work.

Secure your seat by emailing: michele.masucci@kkh.se

is an artist who earned her MFA from the University of Southern California (USC) and a practice-based PhD from HDK-Valand in 2015. She is Professor of Art at Konstfack, where she also leads, with Magnus Bärtås, a PhD course on Artistic Practice. Tan is visiting faculty of the Bard MFA program at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. 

Her work traces the contours of life as it is shaped by desire and determined by the contingent encounters that form it. Lisa Tan’s videos, Sunsets (2012), Notes From Underground (2013), and Waves (2015), comprised her doctoral dissertation, in addition to an artist book titled after the video series, and contains texts by Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Mara Lee, Lauren O’Neill-Butler, Joshua Shaddock and herself, published by Archive Books, Berlin (2015).

For more see lisatan.net

is an artist with a practice-based PhD from the Academy of Art in Tromsø (2018) and a postdoctoral position at the Umeå Academy of Fine Arts (2019–2021). She is Professor of Contemporary Art and Head of the Fine Art programme at Tromsø Academy of Art, UiT. She has served on the board of the Norwegian Artistic Research School and is currently a member of the Committee for Artistic Research at the Swedish Research Council.

In her research project Potential of the Gap, Lisa Torell explored how place, perception, and systems interact using the gap as both method and metaphor to question norms and open space for new ways of thinking. Developed through performances, videos, installations, and books the research reflects her broader investigation into how infrastructures, language, and social codes intersect with questions of access, politics, and the public sphere. Her work includes amongs others Take Care of the Garbage (Research Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 2017) and 9 Artists’ Reflections on Site-Specificity and Place-Related Processes (2016–2017). Torells practice spans site-specific interventions, writing, lectures, and installations, often engaging with the conditions that determine what can appear, be seen, or be heard within a given environment.

For more see lisatorell.com