Patty Chang's work Invocation for a Wandering Lake (part 1&2) was featured at the Tromsø International Film Festival 2024, screening at Tromsø Kunstforening.
This artwork is a personal, associative, narrative meditation on mourning, caregiving, geopolitics, and landscape. The Wandering Lake project continues the artist’s interest in cultural imaginaries. In this work, she returned to her interest in using body as performer and the embodiment of site through performance. It uses water as a medium of politics and poetics. The project is inspired by the book “The Wandering Lake” by Sven Hedin. At the turn of the 20th century, Swedish explorer Hedin was commissioned by the Chinese government to find a modern silk road, or a route through the deserts of western China accessible by car. Simultaneously, he documented his journey to find and map The Wandering Lake. The Wandering Lake had mysteriously disappeared from its original location and had been mis-mapped and lost before being found in a different place.
