Texts
Infrastructures of the Visible: Materiality, System, and Fracture in the Work of Sisel Lan
Sisel Lan’s work unfolds as a sustained investigation into the structural logics that produce, administer, and often render suffering invisible. His practice moves across photography, installation, kinetic sculpture, and material intervention, addressing a redistribution of the sensible and a reordering of the conditions under which certain bodies, territories, and experiences gain access to visibility. Lan destabilizes the frameworks that constitute reality, and in doing so reveals their constructed, contingent, and interrogable nature. The three series that define his production—Measured Lives, Systemic Wounds, and Shifting Realities—function as layers of a single inquiry into the relationship between abstraction and embodiment, as well as between the surface of the image and the forces that shape it.
This operation places his work within a genealogy of contemporary art concerned with the analysis of economic and political systems. The tradition opened by Hans Haacke in the 1970s, in which real estate networks, corporate sponsorship, and institutional power structures became aesthetic material, finds in Lan a continuation that incorporates the specific conditions of Latin American inequality and the global financialization of the twenty-first century. Likewise, his use of currency as a physical support enters into dialogue with Cildo Meireles’s Insertions into Ideological Circuits, a project that intervened returnable Coca-Cola bottles and banknotes in order to inscribe political messages into ordinary circuits of exchange. Lan inherits that operation of symbolic infiltration and radicalizes it, using the dollar bill as a sculptural element and as evidence of the systemic violence contained within financial abstraction.
I.
In Measured Lives, Lan works with one-dollar bills as raw material and as a unit of calculation, carrying the Marxian distinction between use value and exchange value into the realm of sensory experience. In The American Dream (2022), the bill abandons its function as a medium of exchange in order to become surface, texture, and weight. The same unit that has historically served to define the threshold of extreme poverty appears here as sculptural material, forcing the viewer to confront the obscenity of measuring human survival in such terms. The piece participates in a tradition of symbolic intervention upon the signs of capital, though Lan introduces a gesture that is at once formal, statistical, and documentary. Minimum Wage (2024) radicalizes this operation by translating the hourly minimum wage of each U.S. state into an exact material equivalence, without rounding, turning wage variations into visible spatial differences that function as a cartography of inequality inscribed within the political divisions of the territory. What Lan produces is the embodiment of economic data, the moment when the figure recovers density, volume, and consequence.
This strategy finds its most concentrated formulation in 24 horas, 31 minutos (2018), where the arithmetic impossibility of a Mexican worker earning minimum wage being able to purchase a basic food basket within the limits of a single day becomes temporal and material form. The piece lays bare the incapacity to imagine an alternative to the system. This impossibility is translated into perceptible duration, into a temporal excess that overflows the frame of the day and, with it, the logic that claims to contain it. Likewise, A Year of Happiness (2023) shifts the inquiry from labor toward financial subjectivity. This sculpture links the viewer’s reflection to the stock market fluctuations of the sixteen largest companies in the S&P 500, so that one’s self-image becomes literally unstable, conditioned by market performance data. The piece makes perceptible what Byung-Chul Han has described as the extension of the logic of performance into the totality of subjective experience, where identity functions as an index of productivity and the self as a dependent variable of forces that exceed it. The unstable mirror connects with the tradition of Latin American kinetic and participatory art, in which the viewer’s perception becomes a structural component of the work. Here, however, optical instability is governed by financial algorithms, and bodily participation is subordinated to market volatility.
II.
The series Systemic Wounds operates a fundamental shift, from economic measurement to the territorial and bodily consequences of power. In Hugs Not Walls (2017–2025), Lan positions himself at the U.S.–Mexico border in order to record the brief moments in which divided families are allowed physical contact under strict political regulation. The power of the work lies in its rendering visible of the apparatus that administers that contact, and in the border understood as a biopolitical device that regulates proximity, affection, and belonging. The project belongs to a line of work developed independently around borders as zones where invisibility is produced. Lan introduces the embrace as a gesture of temporary emancipation, an affective fissure in the continuity of control. Intimacy under surveillance becomes a political act precisely because it takes place within the very system that prohibits it.
Los 43 (2025) carries this logic into the territory of forced disappearance, establishing absence as ontological condition, as evidence, and as truth. The work situates itself within the tradition of Doris Salcedo, who has made emptiness and material trace the supports of a memory that official discourses seek to foreclose, and alongside Teresa Margolles, whose work with forensic remains gives disturbing presence to the death that institutional systems render invisible. Lan shares with both the conviction that absence possesses a material density of its own, capable of functioning as testimony. Portraits in Confinement (2023) and Global Warming (2022) extend this inquiry toward animal captivity and environmental degradation, operating from the premise that both zoological display and the climate crisis constitute wounds produced by logics of extraction and spectacle that capitalism has normalized. In Portraits in Confinement, photographs made with a toy camera fitted with an improvised lens replicate the optical superficiality through which conservation is presented.
III.
Shifting Realities functions as the reflective axis of the whole, or as the moment when the practice turns back upon its own conditions of possibility: image, perception, and mediation. In Some of the Ones I Couldn’t See (2020–2023), the landscape is accessible only through its reflection on architectural surfaces during a period of confinement, so that the work records the conditions under which experience becomes mediated, partial, and reconstructed. Lan adds a contemporary layer in which mediation is architectural, bodily, and circumstantial, determined by the material restrictions of confinement.
El desgaste de la memoria (2021–2023) translates the algorithmic compression of digitally circulated images into a material and conceptual erosion that extends Hito Steyerl’s reflection on poor images: visual objects degraded by the speed of their circulation, whose loss of resolution is political and economic as much as technical. Steyerl describes this phenomenon as a class society of appearances, in which visual quality reproduces hierarchies of access and power. The progression of the project, from a recognizable image to its almost total dissolution after four hundred compression cycles, materializes a process that usually remains invisible in everyday digital experience: entropy as a structural condition of the contemporary circulation of ideas. Virgilio (2020–2023) completes this arc through the manual weaving of photographic surfaces, shifting the image from digital immediacy toward bodily labor and proposing fragmentation as active reconfiguration, as a constructive gesture toward alternate subjective realities.
Lan’s formal rigor, the precision with which he translates economic metrics into physical structures, the economy with which he situates the human gesture within apparatuses of regulation, and the coherence with which he articulates material erosion and epistemological erosion, together constitute an ethical position as much as an aesthetic one. It is the insistence that form is inseparable from the forces that produce it, and that contemporary art can function as an experiential field in which the infrastructures of power recover weight, density, and, above all, the possibility of being interrogated. In that sense, Sisel Lan’s work belongs to a current of contemporary Latin American art that has been able to articulate political urgency with formal complexity and material investigation, and that finds in the tension between system and subjectivity the most fertile space for the production of sensitive knowledge.
Alberto Ríos de la Rosa