KW Production Series 2020: Lin+Lam

KW Production Series presents Lin+Lam Online Exhibition.

Online exhibition on KW’s website
German version: https://www.kw-berlin.de/kw-production-series-2020-linlam/
"Three Missing Letters" traces the environmental and political contours that affect the free flow of communication across contested borders. The film interleaves complex histories into the legacy of Smith’s failed experiment: hostile military relations, shifting ecological conditions, and the extraction of natural resources as part of the dilating arteries of import and export. Embedded in this telling, is the ongoing labor of Indian and Chinese postmen who continue to deliver mail by running the treacherous no-man’s land of Nathu La, the Himalayan “Pass of the Listening Ear” at 14,000’ elevation. Lin+Lam remark, “this exchange has weathered the ebb and flow of diplomatic relations and has enabled Tibetan refugees to remain in touch with their families when no other contact is permitted.”
The film interrogates not only forms of communication technologies between nation states, but the very ways in which the concept and recognition of “nation” is contingent on access to communication. "Three Missing Letters" was developed throughout the long and winding path to the 2020 US presidential elections and, with prescience, Lin+Lam echo the words of Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali in their third letter: “a country without a post office is a country whose future has been constrained.”
About the artists:
Lin+Lam (Lana Lin and H. Lan Thao Lam) have collaborated together since 2001. They produce research-based projects that expand the conception of history, evidence, and subjectivity. Their work has always served a pedagogic as well as aesthetic function, asking viewers not to take information for granted, but to question the motives behind how representational choices are made and the methods through which they are structured. As artists and scholars, they have engaged with psychoanalysis, anthropology, and post-colonial studies. Lin+Lam’s new video continues to investigate social hierarchies and power relations, assessing history, art and media’s potential for truth-telling and manipulation.
This online exhibition is accompanied by an online talk.
For more information: https://www.kw-berlin.de/.../kw-production-series-2020.../
The KW Production Series is curated and produced by Mason Leaver-Yap, KW’s Associate Curator and is made possible with generous support by the JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION and Outset Germany_Switzerland.