Fiona Tan

Philip Monk

Edited by Michael Maranda. Text by Philip Monk.

Disassembling the Archive

'Five Portraits of the Insane' by the nineteenth century French artist Théodore Géricault are said to be all that remain of originally ten commissioned portraits of insane patients. Each painting depicts a particular mental condition, a so-called monomania including a kleptomaniac, a woman mad with envy, and a child kidnapper. Almost nothing is known about these portraits, but they raise a multitude of questions. Who are these people? In what way are they insane? What and where are the five missing madnesses? Intrigued and inspired by an absence, Tan decides to go in search of them. Pairing personal impressions with formal analysis and archival research, the essay ventures far beyond the boundaries of art history.

10 Madnesses

Louise Bourgeois

Wolfgang Tillmans

Pier Paolo Pasolini

Paul Schrader

Francesco Clemente

Chris Burden

Luigi Ontani

Or A Splendid Readiness For Death

Saint Sebastian

Thorsten Sadowsky

Martin Hochleitner

Kunsthallen (Brandts klædefabrik)

Landesgalerie Linz

Fiona Tan is one of the most distinctive contemporary artists working in film and video. Her work moves between documentation and fiction, biography and fantasy. In using historical and ethnographic film material, Tan shows portraits of individuals and groups from different cultural backgrounds and social strata. Mirror Maker includes important works dating from the last eight years.

Mirror Maker

Francesco Bonami

Correction, Dutch-Australian artist Fiona Tan's first video project undertaken in the United States, encompasses several hundred filmed portraits of prisoners and prison guards taken at prisons in Illinois and California. -- Foreword (p.7).

Correction

S. R. Nathan

'A scholar by inclination, a businessman by necessity, a diplomat by duty' — those were the apt words chosen by a reporter in 1966 to describe Mr Tan Siak Kew and his multi-dimensional public life. He was a fervent supporter of education, President of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce for multiple terms, Singapore's first ambassador to Thailand, nominated member of the Legislative Assembly, community leader of the Teochews, and notable philanthropist. Effectively bilingual and conscious of his responsibility to both his community and the new nation which was about to be born, Tan was able to act as the bridge between the Chinese-speaking and English-speaking communities with his tact and non-partisan position. Tan Siak Kew: Going Against The Grain, is a biographical sketch of this under-appreciated pioneer, telling the story of his public life through historical records and discussions with his contemporaries.

Going Against the Grain

Tan Siak Kew

Saskia Bos

Fiona Tan has been selected as the 2009 entry for the Venice Biennale by famed curator Saskia Boss. Tan has been working on a new site-specific audio-visual installation which refers to Venice's historical role as a global power before the new routes to Asia diluted its role as a major port. The localised perspective of the artwork is sure to garner much attention at this year's 53rd Biennale di Venezia.

Disorient

Tiré du site Internet de Book Works: "Following Vox Populi, Norway and Vox Populi, Sydney this is the third in the series of Vox Populi publications, each one presenting us with a social portrait of a people taken from images selected from personal and private family photo albums. Drawing on the documentary tradition, in combination with contemporary concerns of participation and egalitarianism, Vox Populi, Tokyo continues this ever-expanding mappo mundi. Vox Populi, Tokyo is published to coincide with an exhibition in Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Germany.

Vox Populi, Tokyo

Suzanne Cotter

Tiré du site Internet de Book Works: "Commissioned to make a new work for the Norwegian Parliament in Oslo, Fiona Tan collected family photograph albums from as broad and varied a background as possible, eventually selecting two hundred and sixty-seven images that would be individually framed and presented in the Parliament building. For this book, she revisits the entire collection of images - intimate family portraits that capture private if familiar moments: the birth of a child, birthdays, family gatherings, adolescence, holidays, brothers and sisters, first loves, favourite places. Loosely arranged within three familiar strains - Portrait, Home and Nature - unexpected cross-references and playful associations unfold. While a visual document of a country's people, there is nothing obvious that would identify VOX POPULI, Norway as being Norwegian. The reader is drawn into a seductive and popular ethnography where images of the private and intimate challenge the ideology of official national portraits, and yet also assume a master narrative that defines the whole.

Norway

Vox Populi

Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal

Pierre Landry

Anders Kreuger

Åsa Nacking

Lunds Konsthall

Time and again

Sophie Berrebi

The Dutch artist Fiona Tan is well known for her photography, film, and video installations in which she frequently addresses ideas of identity, memory, and history. This publication documents on one hand recent works including a new large scale project commissioned by the Grand-Hornu Museum of Contemporary Arts in Mons, Belgium and presented here for the first time. This work, titled Shadow Archive, is inspired by Paul Otlet (1868-1944), considered to be one of the forefathers of information science. Shadow Archive deals in particular with Otlet's decades-long utopian quest to establish a central repository for the world's information; between 1919 and 1934, Otlet and his team assembled more than 16 million index cards of data. This book incorporate previously unpublished original drawings and notes drafted by Otlet selected by Fiona Tan for her installation, an amazing archive which reveal his visionary and creative personality as well as his exploration of the limits of the human knowledge.

Fiona Tan: L'archive des ombres - shadow archive

Philadelphia Museum of Art

Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo

Fiona Tan - Inventory : [MAXXI - Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, 27 marzo - 08 settembre 2013 ; Philadelphia Museum of Art, "Live cinema/Fiona Tan: inventory", 14 dicembre 2013 - 23 marzo 2014]

Fiona Tan - Depot

Fiona Tan: GAAF takes as its starting point the Agfacolor advertisement archive -- several thousand 6×6 colour negatives and photographs which were taken between 1952 and 1968.This archive provided Agfa with material for advertisements, brochures, exhibitions, and the magazine Agfa Photoblätter.After discovering this almost forgotten and uncatalogued archive at the Museum Ludwig, the artist Fiona Tan became interested in the inherent paradox of its images: staged and idealized scenes of models posing for professional photographers, nonetheless intended to appear spontaneous and authentic, as if taken by amateurs.The Dutch word 'gaaf' -- an anagram, or reordering, of the letters in Agfa -- means 'neat' or 'perfect.' In this body of work, Fiona Tan focuses on the image and the role of women as portrayed in these photographs, drawing attention to the ideal as opposed to the reality of these formative decades in postwar Germany.Published on occasion of the exhibition, Fiona Tan: GAAF at Museum Ludwig, Cologne (4 May - 11 August 2019).Co-published with Museum Ludwig.English and German text.

Fiona Tan - GAAF

Fiona Tan is a leading international artist. Born in Indonesia, she grew up in Australia and now lives and works in the Netherlands. Tan is well known for her film-based installations, archival constructs and photographic works that explore and interrogate collective memory, and the construction of identity. Grand in scale, acutely intimate in observation, the works of Fiona Tan demand both space and time to absorb, to reflect and to distil the richness of their visual examination and meaning and to situate our own experience in relation to them. This stylish exhibition catalogue marks Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation's (SCAF) presentation of Fiona Tan: Coming Home. Two Sydney venues each are hosting a separate body of work. Disorient, 2009, first shown to great acclaim in the Dutch Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale is screening at SCAF and A Lapse of Memory, 2007, is being shown at the National Art School, Darlinghurst.

Coming Home

Provenance : Fiona Tan

John Berger

Lynne Cooke

Okwui Enwezor

Doris van Drathen

Adrian Searle

This Reader, edited and introduced by noted art historian and critic Gilda Williams, gathers the key critical writings across the artist's essential works as explored through the lens of art history, post-colonial theory, film analysis, and more. Catalogue essays and exhibition reviews on individual works are set alongside Tan's own substantial body of writing: essays, letters, scripts, project notes, as well as discussions of other artists' work, from Chantal Akerman to Jeff Wall.

Reader. Museum Der Moderne Salzburg / Kunsthalle Krems

Fiona Tan. with the Other Hand

Fiona Tan

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