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 that has been specially made for this exhibition.