H. Lan Thao Lam is an interdisciplinary artist and Associate Professor of Fine Arts in the School of Art, Media, and Technology at Parsons School of Design. Trained in architecture, their practice is grounded in research, striving to examine the ramifications of the past to speak to the current moment, in the shifting forms of installation, object-making, film, photography, public interventions and sometimes writing and curating. Since 2001, Lam has worked collaboratively with Lana Lin. As Lin + Lam, the collaboration has produced works engaging issues of immigration, sites of trauma, national identity and historical memory. Their projects have been exhibited and screened internationally including at KW Berlin; 2018 Busan Biennale; 3rd Guangzhou Triennial; Korean Arts Council; Taiwan International Documentary Festival; Stedelijk Museum; The International Short Film Festival, Oberhausen; The Kitchen; The New Museum; Queens Museum, NY; and Void Arts Centre, Derry, Northern Ireland. Lam’s work has been reviewed in numerous publications, including Art Forum, the New York Times, Art Journal, The Huffington Post, Time Out Hong Kong, and Art Asia Pacific. Their work has been supported by Canada Council for the Arts, Vera List Center for Art and Politics, India China Institute, and MacDowell.

Born in My Tho, Viet Nam, Lam received their MFA from CalArts, and considers their experience in refugee camps and housing projects as part of their education.

During their time at GIDEST, Lam will be focusing on their current project How to Live with Solastalgia, which examines the material and psychic dimensions of climate catastrophe across human and more-than-human worlds. Inspired by philosopher Glenn Albrecht’s term “solastalgia,” the project explores ecological grief, arboreal disease, and environmental loss as consequences of settler colonialism, industrial extraction, and global supply-chain economies.

Grounded in sustained observation of a former sawmill site in South Central Connecticut, the project combines motion-activated video, experimental printmaking, and sculptural practice to investigate processes of decay, toxicity, memory, and regeneration. Collaborations with arborists and dendrochronologists, encounters with wildlife, and the collection of organic and synthetic materials contribute to an evolving archive that informs the work’s visual and material language. Experimental printmaking processes function as both image-making techniques and forms of environmental recording. How to Live with Solastalgia approaches artistic practice as a mode of witnessing and relational accountability. The project asks how art might register environmental loss without reproducing extractive ways of seeing, while remaining attentive to land, ecological histories, and the fragile interdependencies that persist amid planetary instability.