FIONA TAN
30 January -15 March 2003
Frith Street Gallery is pleased to present the first solo exhibition in the UK of the work of Fiona Tan. Tan's complex and lyrical installations are created using photographic and filmic material - sometimes found in various archives, at other times specially created by the artist. The imagery concentrates on specific moments in time and their consequences, engaging the traditional dialectic between the ethnographic claim to veritable objectivity and the personal travelogue as a search for the subjective.
In this exhibition Tan continues to explore current artistic and social questions such as the interaction with images and the recycling of historical visual material. Cradle is a 16mm film installation composed of a very brief segment that has been seamlessly looped so that it appears as continuous motion. It depicts a swaddled infant swinging from a tree. The sepia-toned imagery is projected onto a white cloth hanging freely in the darkened gallery, so it seems as if the shaft of light emanating from the projector lens has somehow revealed the picture of the child, as though it had been invisibly imprinted on the cloth.
In Calendar Girl the artist takes as her starting point an old book discovered in a flea market which reproduces on successive pages an image of the same child. Recorded on film the turning of the pages enacts the passage of a year and animates the image of the child, visually unfreezing a small moment in time.
Other works include Downside Up, and Tilt, a new video work which has been specially made for this exhibition.
Fiona Tan was born in Indonesia in 1996, she studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunst in Amsterdam where she lives and works. Her work can be seen this year at Villa Arson, Nice, De Pont Foundation, Tilburg, Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Other notable exhibitions include Documenta 11, Kassel and the Yokohama Triennial in 2002, the 49th Venice Biennale and the Berlin Biennale, 2001 and Scenario at the Kunstverein Hamburg, 2000.
CURRENT FIONA TAN EXHIBITIONS
Akte 1
Including more than ten film and video works from the past five years, this is Fiona Tan's first large museum exhibition to be held in the Netherlands.
De Pont foundation for contemporary art
Exhibition 25 January to 11 May 2003
© 2002 Frith Street Gallery
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