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,...
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...
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 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...
Transporting the viewer to a very different time and place, Nellie is inspired by the life of Cornelia van Rijn, Rembrandt's illegitimate daughter, who at the age of sixteen emigrated to Batavia (present-day Jakarta). Little is known about Cornelia's life; no portraits of her are known to exist....
A confused old man, Henry, lives on his own in an old empty building that is reminiscent of a deserted palace. Henry hasn't been outside for years. The camera follows a day in his life - his simple daily chores and his eccentric rituals. Henry looks like a European from a good family, but has many...
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.
The life and work of enigmatic Dutch/Californian conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader, who in 1975 disappeared under mysterious circumstances at sea in the smallest boat ever to cross the Atlantic. As seen through the eyes of fellow emigrant filmmaker René Daalder, the picture becomes a sweeping...
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...
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...
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...
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.
Amsterdam-based photographer and video artist Fiona Tan (born 1966) has been a central figure on the contemporary art scene since the 1990s. In her video News from the Near Future (2003) a collage of historic film and audio material tells of man’s ambivalent relationship with water as a force of...
Tan’s father is Chinese-Indonesian and her mother is Australian. She grew up in Australia and studied in Germany and the Netherlands. Her multicultural background led her to seek out family members scattered around the globe and interview them for this film.
Saint Sebastian was filmed by Fiona Tan at the annual ‘Toshiya’ in Kyoto, a coming-of-age ceremony for women aged twenty in 2001. It was for the first time ever that a film camera was allowed to capture the procedings. Dressed in traditional kimono hundreds of young women perform the Japanese...
