ERIKA TAN

Erika Tan is an artist and curator whose work is primarily research-led and manifests itself in multiple formats such as moving image, publications, curatorial and participatory projects.

Tan’s most recent research has focused on the postcolonial and transnational, working with archival artifacts, exhibition histories, received narratives, contested heritage, subjugated voices and the transnational movement of ideas, people and objects; her future projects point towards the digitization of collective cultural memory and cloud architecture through the prism of ruins, hauntings, and mnemonic collapse.

For the exhibition Tan explores the material, physical and situated histories of cocoa, working from personal experiences to cultural tropes. Taking the melting point of chocolate as a definitive moment that defines good chocolate from bad (that it melts in your mouth and not in your hands) it is this very point that also divides cocoa growers (producers in the south) from consumers (in the north). This pattern of differentiation is explored in the work through the motif of the melting point, where all that is solid melts into a mass of sticky, dark, mess.

Image: Chocolate cast Sour Kana, 2023. Image Courtesy of the artist.