Eliza Tan

I am an art historian whose interests centre on contemporary art's engagement with decolonial and feminist memory activism, particularly in the contexts of East and Southeast Asia and their diasporas. My research addresses the political agency of image-making, performance and community-based practices and processes which grapple with histories of violence and colonial erasure, extraction and exploitation. 

Prior to joining the University of Brighton, I co-led the MA in Modern and Contemporary Asian Art at Sotheby’s Institute of Art. I currently continue to teach on the BA Fine Art and Fine Art and Art History courses as an external faculty member of Kingston University, where I completed my PhD. As an Arts and Humanities Council (AHRC) doctoral awardee, my thesis explored the intersection of postwar memory, feminism and art activism in Japan in the 1990s through the lens of pioneering feminist artist Yoshiko Shimada’s praxis and the broader artistic constellations of which she was a part, as women artists' and performance networks gained visibility across East and Southeast Asia. I hold an MA History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art and BA (Joint Hons) History of Art and English from the University of York.

In addition to the independent projects which I have collaboratively realised with artists, I have worked in the areas of exhibition curation and curatorial research, public programmes, visual arts grants management as well as press and public relations with organisations including the Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston University, Solomon R. Guggenheim New York, Singapore Art Museum, National Arts Council Singapore, and Art Forum Berlin. My writing has appeared in a range of publications including the Journal of Gender Studies, Oxford Art Journal, n.paradoxa, ArtAsiaPacific and documenta 12 magazines project. 

I welcome projects concerned with the impact of material and sociopolitical transformations on artistic developments in East and Southeast Asia; which query relationships between art and globalisation; the representation of memory and construction of diasporic subjectivities in post-colonial, post-conflict contexts; feminist interventions and strategies of resistance; artists and the archive; performance and the aesthetics of protest.

I teach modern and contemporary histories of art and approaches to heritage, critical art theory and visual methodologies. I lead core Level 5 modules 'Spaces and Bodies'; Level 6 modules 'Art and Visual Culture in Communities' and 'Constructing Histories' and the MA module 'Heritage in a Global Context'.