Sylvia/Xinran Tan,
curatorial, snapshots














that I curated...



Ghost Dance, Jimei Art Centre, Xiaman, 2024-2025

Unanswered Call, CHOWspace, Shanghai, 2024

Ripples, Hypha Gallery 2 Sugar House Island, London, 2024


The Place of Indivisible Existence, CHOWspace, Shanghai, 2024
Belong and Belongings, Eaton HK, Hong Kong, 2023




that I assisted...



Silo Dreams, Keyi Gallery, Hefei, 2024

Modern Time: Masterpieces from the Collection of Museum Berggruen / Nationalgalerie Berlin, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA Edge), Shanghai, 2023

Liquid Ground, Para Site, Hong Kong, 2021

Curtain, Para Site, Hong Kong, 2021

M/Made in Shanghai, Power Station of Art, Shanghai, 2020

PSA Collection Series: Shanghai Waves: Historical Archives and Works of Shanghai Biennale, Power Station of Art, Shanghai, 2020

Workshop: Wu Tuo Bang—Construct a Utopia World with Your Imagination, Power Station of Art, Shanghai, 2020
Courtesy of Three Shadows Photography Art Centre
Courtesy of Three Shadows Photography Art Centre


Ghost Dance


Jimei X Arles Curatorial Award for Photography and Moving Image, Jury Panel’s Special Mention
Jimei Art Centre
11/29/2024 – 01/12/2025

Curator: Starry Chen, Sylvia Tan
Artists: Laura Chen, Carô Gervay, Ance Janevica, Lee Kai Chung, Hester Yang, Tianyi Zheng

In the film Ghost Dance, Jacques Derrida, improvising the role of a professor, when asked whether he believes in ghosts, answers: The cinema is the art of ghosts…It’s the art of allowing the ghosts to come back.1 Imagery retains and summons haunting memories of the past, while memories, by projecting onto images, acquire “grafts” of spectrality.2 The dialectical image, in its interaction with humans, is a suspended sway between life and death, alienation and new meaning, becoming a spectral Nachleben amidst historical alternation. 

The exhibition “Ghost Dance” employs image archive as a ghost medium and memory technology. Featuring photography, video installations, and archival works, it aims to reveal the spatial and temporal disjunction within geopolitical diaspora and personal archives, attempting counter-chronicle activation, reconfiguration, and continuous overwriting of the image Nachleben. 

Despite the global nomadism envisioned by digital media, the perpetual homelessness of transnational diasporic identities still lingers and causes a mal-être. Those who depart undergo a dual erasure, both physical and narrative, by their homeland, becoming “irrelevant others” excluded from a solidified national identity, as though severed yet enduring. The nostalgic specters, whether unable or unwilling to be eradicated, transform into a desire for archive amid fragmented temporal and geographical experiences. In the exhibition, private image archives and visual reconstruction of historical documents spotlight how the hyper-rationality of archival technology can be undermined and disrupted by subjective emotions, the heterogeneous ruptures hidden in the spectral experience, and even writing fallacies of diaspora. Meanwhile, this archive fever (mal d’archive), driven by compulsion of self-sustenance and self-preservation, is often inscribed by a self-destructive death drive,3 where writing and erasure of memories parallel. Through the “archiviolithic” tendency of archive, the exhibition not only addresses image archive as an existence of personal and collective memory but also explores how it dances as a ghost, between presence and absence, to extend the retelling of migration and archive its own narratives through enduring ephemerality.

1 Ghost Dance, directed by Ken McMullen (1983), 16:00-17:00.
2 Antoine De Baecque, Thierry Jousse, “Cinema and its Ghosts: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” trans. Peggy Kamuf, Discourse 37, no. 1-2 (2015): 26-27.
3 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 11-12.

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