Speculative materialisations: tracing a feminist telepresence in Erika Tan’s Barang Barang: Spectral Entanglements (2021)

As part of the research project ARTCHAE: Rediscovering Video and Installation Art as a Archaeology of Telepresence, between Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia and University of Milan, Lucy Reynolds will present and discuss Erika Tan’s recent moving image work Barang Barang: Spectral Entanglements  and the related installation Barang Barang which was first exhibited at the Stanley Picker Gallery in 2021. 

Erika Tan’s double screen video work Barang Barang: Spectral Entanglements (2021) imagines an impossible meeting between four women artists: Georgette Chen, Dora Gordine, Kim Lim and Fay Tan. Enabled by video technology, these four figures traverse the span of time and space, and lives lived across continents and in different epochs, to share their stories of creative feminist endeavour. Tan’s film, like many of her media installations, stages a speculative space of telepresence to ask far reaching questions on the gaps and ellipses of the colonial archive. The Malay term ‘barang barang’, variously defined as ‘stuff’, ‘bric-a brac’, ‘freight’ describes the convergence and circulation of objects that are in transit, unsorted and outmoded. As we will discuss, following a screening of Tan’s film, this term could equally describe the lost and fading images and apparatus of the media archive, and the ways in which they might find new lives in a speculative fiction.

Erika will join Lucy remotely to discuss Barang Barang: Spectral Entanglements (2021), following a screening of the work.