Drawing from our collections, Tan explores the layered histories of Limehouse. The project’s title is taken from a 1934 tabloid that called Limehouse Causeway the “Street of Weird Memories.”
During her residency, Tan consulted photographs, clippings, ephemera, maps, and directories documenting the communities that gathered in Limehouse in the early 20th century. Collaborating with locally run AI models (SDXL and Flux) and guided by extensive archival research, she created speculative “forgeries” of lost buildings and sites—interweaving AI interpretation, historical material, and her own creative perspective. She placed them back at their original addresses, where they now converse with and unsettle the Limehouse of today. Tan’s methods blur the line between archival research and fiction-ing, bringing multiple practices together in dialogue through experimentation with emerging technologies.
Come talk with the artist and see her behind-the-scenes research processes by booking onto an upcoming public tours -
Thursday 21 August: 15:30 - 16:30
Thursday 4 September: 14:00 - 15:00
Saturday 6 September: 15:30 - 16:30
More tours will be announced for late September and early October.
