Lisa Tan

How can we understand rivers? Lisa Tan’s video essay speaks about water and memory through a palm reading and a conversation with the author Lewis Hyde. His book A Primer For Forgetting approaches the flow of memory through a series of episodes around myth, the self, nation and politics. Lisa Tan reads Hyde’s palm following lines resembling rivers and tributaries, as a stimulus for an intimate conversation around waterways, forgetting, the passing of time, and formation of the self.

Stockholm, 16 October 2023  

Dear Lewis Hyde,  

Hello from Stockholm, Sweden, where I live and work as an artist and educator. Reaching the final pages of A Primer for Forgetting, I was quietly moved to tears. I do not dare to consider that I have any authority whatsoever for such an assessment, but I thought to myself: this is how good, how truly good the world can be when erudition is harnessed in the hands of someone with the mightiest sense of compassion. I thank you greatly for your work, which, throughout my adult life, has affected the way I read, make and live with others.  

I write to you now with a proposal. Last summer, I was commissioned as one of ten artists to contribute a new piece for a biennial-type of exhibition taking place this coming April in a town outside Vienna. The premise is to respond and “collaborate with”, in the curator’s words, a river that runs through the town. Immediately, Lethe came to my mind. And I subsequently dipped into A Primer (and also Scott A. Small’s book on forgetting after reading the article on both in the New York Review of Books.) 

How does one respond to a river? Civilizations may have dominantly formed around rivers, delineating borders, but to its credit a river never chooses sides. What is river consciousness if such a thing exists? Taken in by “time out of mind” that appears in the story of the origin of statutes of limitations in your book, I wonder how a river relates to time immemorial, and I land on a conviction that neither memory nor forgetting is of any interest whatsoever to a river. That even if they persistently attract a correspondence between life and death and the functions of memory and forgetting, rivers will continue to go on (or not) with or without us. 

Now, my proposal to you. Would you be open to granting me a visit, in a quiet place where you feel comfortable, perhaps even in your home in Massachusetts, to sit with you for a filmed conversation around these and related questions while I try to read your palms? I do not have any knowledge or experience in palmistry, but I promise that I will learn all I can in advance of meeting with you. I choose the palm of a hand, marked with lines resembling rivers, tributaries, as a way of anticipating how a reading could generate a conversation and prompt stories around divination, rivers of forgetting and, indeed, the life line. Perhaps also the work on nature’s pull that I see you are currently doing?  

I would be happy to share my work with you if you wish, but I hesitate to make this letter any lengthier than it has already become. Thank you for your time and consideration. I very much hope to hear from you soon and, if you do answer affirmatively, which I so dearly hope, please consider a visit before the end of this year or at the beginning of the next.  

Your admiring reader,  

Lisa 

Lisa Tan (1973, Syracuse, USA) is an artist and educator based in Stockholm. Her work is imbued with personal narrative and is marked by material and conceptual precision. It takes the form of installation, photography, video, writing and other gestures. She is currently Professor of Art at Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm. Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions and screenings at institutions such as Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam (2022), Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2021), Tabakalera, San Sebastian (2021), Whitechapel Gallery, London (2020), MIT List Center (2017), Kunsthall Trondheim (2017), ICA Philadelphia (2016). She was included in “The Ghost Ship and the Sea Change”, the 11th Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art (GIBCA) (2021), “Why Not Ask Again?”, the 11th Shanghai Biennale (2016) and “Surround Audience”, the Triennial exhibition at the New Museum (2015).