ARTEXT : La Biennale di Venezia
53 Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte
Giardini di Castello - Olanda 

DISORIENT
Fiona Tan

Fiona Tan (b. 1966) is interested in the cultural role of the camera, whether film or still, and how its images trigger our imagination. Images of people almost always play a central role in her photographs, films and audio-video installations, and she places great emphasis on how images "affect and inform the internal picture we have of ourselves, of others and of the world around us."

The role of language and the written word is equally fundamental to her work, and Tan personally scripts the texts and essays that accompany her films. Many of her works are defined by a back and forth shifting between visual and literal possibilities of meaning.
For Tan, the audiovisual story is simultaneously one and many.

At the Dutch Pavilion, the artist will present Disorient (2009), a new video installation that draws on the city's medieval influence before the discovery of new routes to Asia diminished its power. Tan's fascination with time, history, and memory led her to explore the biography of Marco Polo, who left home at the age of seventeen and traveled extensively for the next twenty-five years. Whereas in Tan's earlier pieces, the search for identity is a psychological journey, in Venice the approach is focusing on how people relate to the city's cultural history.
"I am interested in the juxtaposition of word and image, in conflicting relationships between the two and...in the slippages of truth or truths in the many versions of historical accounts."

Frieze - What images keep you company in the space where you work?

Fiona Tan - A photograph of silk cultivation in a Chinese factory, a photocopy of an elephant stepping out of a train, Albrecht Dürer’s etching, Rhinoceros (1515), a snapshot of an astronaut standing on the moon taken from Japanese television, a panoramic photograph from the 1950s of pupils from a high school, an Islamic map of the world from the 12th century, an anonymous photograph of a Hungarian girl in traditional costume standing in a field, arm-in-arm with a man who is wearing a fake sheep’s head, a postcard of the panel, Hell, from Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights (1503–4), a newspaper cutting of two Korean brothers crying and covering their faces with handkerchiefs after being reunited after 50 years, a stereoscopic photograph of a waterfall, a reproduction of an engraving of a meteorite storm over the Niagara Falls in 1833, and a photograph of children on the beach in Java.

Curatori : Saskia Bos

Artisti : Fiona Tan

Web siite - http://www.fionatanvenice.nl