Keen for the First Object
LANA LIN is an artist, filmmaker, writer, and Associate Professor of Media Studies at The New School. Her work examines the fragilities and contradictions of human and discursive bodies, emphasizing the conceptual and poetic capacities of moving image media. Drawing on psychoanalysis, her recent book, Freud’s Jaw and Other Lost Objects: Fractured Subjectivity in the Face of Cancer (Fordham, 2017) centers on three exemplary figures–Sigmund Freud, Audre Lorde, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick–to consider what it means to live with life-threatening illness. The Cancer Journals Revisited, her feature experimental non-fiction film, continues this inquiry, focusing on Lorde’s classic memoir/manifesto which actualized intersectionality before the term was even coined. Her current project, in collaboration with H. Lan Thao Lam, engages with the epistolary impulse at the Northeastern border between India and China.