Downside Up

‘…I lose my bearings. But after all, is that such a bad thing?’ - FT

Facing Forward

In reframing and re-editing existing ethnographic films, Tan exposes their anthropological underpinnings and questions the conventions of filmmaking. What is the relationship between the observer and the observed? How can one ever know another? The voice-over, a fictional dialogue taken from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, may offer an answer. The explorer Marco Polo and Emperor Kublai Khan are speaking about travel and looking back on the past, when Polo observes, “The traveler recognises the little that is his, discovering the much he ha...

Ascent

Through a grey blanket of clouds, we barely discern the contours of Mount Fuji, a volcano with many faces. 4,500 exceptional and diverse photographs from the past 150 years form the basis for Ascent. Made entirely with stills, it is a filmic experiment balancing between documentary and fiction, photography and film, where an English woman and her deceased Japanese partner, Hiroshi, lead the way. As Mount Fuji is climbed across geographical, temporal and cultural divides, the narrative unfolds, exploring unexpected paths.

Dearest Fiona

As a voice reads letters from a father to his daughter off camera, 20th century archival images from the Netherlands are shown. Fiona Tan touchingly explores what potential emerges when sound and image diverge.

Vertical White

With a static camera Tan films the dense night-time traffic in West Los Angeles from her temporary studio location at the Getty Center. Undercutting the cinematic quality inherent in this view of teeming traffic, the upright frame instead suggests a domestic window or an abstract painting. The space is flattened, and the viewer is unsettled. Shorn of a narrative, Vertical White is part of a trio of video works that are a series of dream-like moving pictures.

Vertical Wide

With a static camera Tan films the dense night-time traffic in West Los Angeles from her temporary studio location at the Getty Center. Undercutting the cinematic quality inherent in this view of teeming traffic, the upright frame instead suggests a domestic window or an abstract painting. The space is flattened, and the viewer is unsettled. Shorn of a narrative, Vertical Wide is part of a trio of video works that are a series of dream-like moving pictures.

Vertical Red

With a static camera Tan films the dense night-time traffic in West Los Angeles from her temporary studio location at the Getty Center. Undercutting the cinematic quality inherent in this view of teeming traffic, the upright frame instead suggests a domestic window or an abstract painting. The space is flattened, and the viewer is unsettled. Shorn of a narrative, Vertical Red is part of a trio of video works that are a series of dream-like moving pictures.

History's Future

Losing his memory after a mugging, a man known only as 'MP' (Missing Person) leaves his home and sets out on a journey - in search not only for his memory but perhaps also for a new identity. MP finds himself confronted by a world in which there are no longer any certainties; an era of crisis on many levels. On his travels from country to country, portrayed via an associative image montage and through a series of strange, illuminating, sometimes comic encounters, MP attempts to gain insight into the complexity of life in the 21st-century Wes...

Island

Island (2008) is a 12-minute black-and-white video that surveys the distinctive terrain of Gotland, an island off the eastern coast of Sweden. Projected on a large wall in Vancouver, Island uses prolonged static shots to immerse the viewer in an austere landscape.

Footsteps

In Footsteps, Fiona Tan creates connections between personal stories and the world around us. The footage shows children at play and Dutch windmills, but above all people engaged in heavy physical labour in the countryside and in factories. In a fascinating juxtaposition, she combines these images with excerpts from letters she received from her father just after she moved to the Netherlands in the late 1980s. Through his education in Indonesia, Tan’s father knew a lot about the Netherlands without ever having visited the country. In the let...