Dutch Pavilion

Fiona Tan
Disorient, 2009
(c) Fiona Tan
courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London

Fiona Tan
Disorient
June 7 - November 22, 2009

Dutch Pavilion / padiglione Olanda
53rd International Art Exhibition
La Biennale di Venezia 2009
Curator: Saskia Bos
Commissioned and organized by: Mondriaan Foundation

http://www.fionatanvenice.nl


Amsterdam-based film and video artist Fiona Tan represents the
Netherlands at the 53rd International Art Exhibition of La Biennale
di Venezia with a new audio-visual installation entitled Disorient.

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."

Two other recent works will also be on view in Venice, works which
were chosen to complement and enhance the overall installation by the
way they are situated in the architecture. For Provenance (2008), Tan
researched 17th-century, "Golden Age" portrait paintings in the
Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and responded by making six contemporary
video portraits of modern Amsterdammers. In Rise and Fall (2009),
images of water--turbulent, churning as well as slow-moving and
placid--are focused on as a metaphor for how memory is formed.

Fiona Tan was born in Indonesia and grew up in Australia. In 1988 she
moved to the Netherlands to pursue studies at the Rietveld Academie
and the Rijksakademie. Her work has been exhibited widely in numerous
international exhibitions and institutions including Documenta 11
(Kassel), Yokohama Triennale (Japan), Lunds Konsthall (Sweden),
Pinakothek der Moderne (Munich), Tate Modern (London) and the New
Museum (New York). The artist lives and works in Amsterdam, where she
teaches at De Ateliers.

New York-based Saskia Bos, Curator of the Dutch Pavilion in Venice,
is an art historian and a renowned curator. Since October 2005, Bos
has held the position of Dean of the School of Art at The Cooper
Union.

The official catalogue of the Dutch presentation will be issued by
Kehrer publishers. It includes contributions by Saskia Bos, Fiona
Tan, Dominic van den Boogerd, Director of De Ateliers in Amsterdam
since 1995, art historian and author Doris von Drathen and Thomas
Elsaesser, professor emeritus at the University of Amsterdam,
Departement of Media and Culture, and since 2005 a visiting professor
at Yale University.