Patty Chang @ Insitute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, USA (ICA LA)

BANK is thrilled to announce that artist Patty Chang’s “The Wandering Lake, 2009–2017” is on view at Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, from March 17, 2019. Patty Chang is an interdisciplinary artist working in performance, video and installation. She has exhibited internationally at institutions such as the MOMA in New York; the New Museum in New York; the Hammer Museum in LA; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; the Hamburg Kunstverein in Hamburg, Germany; and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden. In 2009 she was named the Guna S. Mundheim Fellow of Visual Arts at the American Academy in Berlin and she is a 2014 recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. 

The Wandering Lake is a personal, associate, narrative meditation on mourning, caregiving, geopolitics and landscape. The Wandering Lake project continues Chang’s interest in cultural imaginaries. In this work, she has returned to an interest in her 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 20^th 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 had mysteriously disappeared from its original location and had been mismapped and lost before being found in different place. Chang is interested in how when a geographical body shifts positions, it displaces and calls into question the systems and the identities built up around it. It moves her to think about how unstable landscape can mirror and rupture our sense of reality, place, and self.