Dodge and/or Burn presents both new and existing works that for this context act together in a unified gesture. The visitor is invited to direct her own path through a system of open walls built for the exhibition, creating porous zones for a selection of images, objects, sounds and video works.
The exhibition is grounded in an illustration by famed neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks of the physiological organization of migraines. Instead of the graph it is meant to be, Tan sees Sacks’ drawing as an architectural floor plan and superimposes it on Accelerator’s own. The merging becomes the basis for the new site-specific installation Promise or Threat, 2023, which spreads over both gallery spaces.
Tan uses a neurological disorder as metaphor in an experiential way to animate her persistent curiosity in subjectivity and representation. In the artist’s own words, “art, like illness—in its dissonance and suspension has the ability to transform the way we understand ourselves, our desires.”
In this exhibition, Dodging and burning—the photography technique that manipulates exposure to either lighten or darken areas of an image—shares the verbs’ other meanings related to quick movement, all-consuming heat and exhaustion.
After a worldwide emergency that has shifted character into other threats one of the central questions raised at Accelerator this fall will be: How is the individual subject formed at this moment in time, given its iteration of violence and its compelling affects?
