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.