Curator's Talk with Lasse Lau

Talk with Lasse Lau, one of the curators of our upcoming exhibition Past is Not Post.

Past is Not Post examines a growing number of artists working in relationship to archival research or investigations of historical memory. While the sites, methods, and circumstances of these practices remain diverse, there is a common artistic impulse to work through history as a backdoor when options in the present seem closed. Given the ambiguous role of artists in contemporary societies, particularly the difficulty of connecting to existing political and social struggles, the intersectional and incomplete stories of the past offer alternate approaches. Can this engagement of the past create spaces to rearticulate our collective possibilities and demands, spaces emblematic of both resistance and retreat?

Lasse Lau (b. 1974 in Sønderborg, Denmark) lives in Copenhagen and New York, USA working as a visual artist and filmmaker. His projects often function as a mediator and channel of crises and displacements that occur by frictions of reason in-between absolute, relative or relational spaces. Lau studied at the Funen Art Academy, Denmark and the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program, USA. His work has been exhibited at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Aarhus Art Museum, Denmark; and the Contemporary Museum, Baltimore, among others.