Fiona Tan is a sensitive and analytical witness of her time. Born in Indonesia and raised in Australia, she has been living in the Netherlands for over twenty years now. In her video piece Rise and Fall the artist examines the retrospective gaze and its relationship to the images we carry within ourselves. A double projection, the work shows us an older woman who is reminiscing about her life when she was still young. The images move back and forth between present and past. In between we are confronted with footage of flowing water – as a metaphor for the flow of memory, so to speak. Inspired by the tradition of 17th century Dutch portraiture, Fiona Tan created six short film portraits of different individuals for her work Provenance. In these she shows her models as they engage in everyday activities. The simple scenes refer to classic genre painting where activities such as eating, reading or sleeping served as common subjects. In her video pieces and photographic works the artist is invariably concerned with the image of an individual and the way in which this individual relates to his or her environment and thus to the world. Captured in fascinating images, Fiona Tan creates moving portraits of people, while subtly linking personal sentiments to their social and cultural context.
The exhibition Rise and Fall is a joint project with the Vancouver Art Gallery. Following its presentation at the Aargauer Kunsthaus in Aarau the exhibition will be on view at the Vancouver Art Gallery in Vancouver from 9 May until 6 September, 2010, at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C., from 18 September, 2010, until 9 January, 2011, and at the Galerie de l'UQAM in Montréal in the spring of 2011.
