Lucy Reynolds 2026. Speculative Materializations in Erika Tan’s Barang Barang: Spectral Entanglements (2021). in: ARTCHAE. For a Media Ar(t)chaeology of Telepresence Milano University Press. pp. 89-105
| Chapter title | Speculative Materializations in Erika Tan’s Barang Barang: Spectral Entanglements (2021) |
|---|---|
| Authors | Lucy Reynolds |
| Abstract | Erika Tan’s double screen video work Barang Barang: Spectral Entanglements (2021) imagines an impossible meeting between four women artists: Georgette Chen, Dora Gordine, Kim Lim and Fay Tan. Enabled by video technology, these four figures traverse the span of time and space, and lives lived across continents and in different epochs, to share their stories of creative feminist endeavour. Tan’s film, like many of her media installations, stages a speculative space to ask far reaching questions on the gaps and ellipses of the colonial archive. The Malay term “barang barang,” variously defined as “stuff,” “bric-a brac,” “freight” describes the convergence and circulation of objects that are in transit, unsorted and outmoded. This term could equally describe the lost and fading images and apparatus of the media archive, and the ways in which they might find new lives in a speculative fiction. |
| Book title | ARTCHAE. For a Media Ar(t)chaeology of Telepresence |
| Page range | 89-105 |
| Year | 2026 |
| Publisher | Milano University Press |
| Publication dates | |
| Published | 02 Apr 2026 |
| Digital Object Identifier (DOI) | https://doi.org/10.54103/milanoup.232.c660 |
| File | License CC BY-SA 4.0 File Access Level Open (open metadata and files) |
| Web address (URL) | https://doi.org/10.54103/milanoup.232.c660 |