Fiona Tan has made carefully crafted and intensely compassionate works in expanded film and video installations since the mid-1990s. In her work, she investigates how we represent ourselves and the mechanisms that determine how we interpret the representation of others. Tan lives and works in Amsterdam.  

She explores history and time and our place within them, working within the contested territory of representation. Deeply embedded in all of Tan’s works is her fascination with the mutability of identity, the deceptive nature of representation and the play of memory across time and space in a world increasingly shaped by global culture. She investigates how we represent ourselves and the mechanisms that determine how we interpret the representation of others.

Since the mid-1990s, she has made carefully crafted and intensely compassionate works in expanded film and video installations. Photography and film, made by her, or by others, or a combination of both, are her mediums, while classification and the archive are her strategies. Disorient (2009), conceived for the Dutch Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, points to the strategic geopolitical position held by Venice in the past and raises questions around contemporary globalisation. Filmed on location at the pavilion, its voiceover was composed of quotations from Marco Polo’s contested travelogue Il Milione. A testament to Tan’s passion for archives, her video installation Pickpockets (2020) stems from an album of photographs she came across when in residence at the Getty Research Center, Los Angeles. It contained early examples of mugshots taken of pickpockets apprehended at the World’s Fair in Paris in 1889. Fascinated by the subjects of these portraits, their names and countries of origin, and their unknown stories, she invited a group of writers to devise monologues from the point of view of these individuals, which were then performed and recorded by actors.

Fiona Tan studied at the Rietveld Academie and at the Rijksakademie voor beeldende kunsten. Over the past twenty years her video installations, films and photographic works have gained increasing international acclaim and have been exhibited all over the world. In 2009 she represented The Netherlands at the Venice Biennial and in 2010 she took part in the Architecture Biennial in Venice. Presentations of her work have included Documenta 11 as well as many international biennials. In 2016-17 she was artist in residence with a fellowship at the Getty Center, Los Angeles. Solo exhibitions have taken place at institutions including the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, Museum für moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Vancouver Artgallery, the Baltic, Gateshead, Museum de Pont, Tilburg, MAC’s, Grand Hornu. Her work is included in collections such as the Tate Modern, Guggenheim, Centre Pompidou, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, MCA Chicago and Schaulager, Basel. In Autumn 2020 Tan’s mid-career retrospective With the other hand opened with a double solo exhibition simultaneously at Kunsthalle Krems and the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Austria. Tan’s major solo show Mountains and Molehills is on view at The Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam until early January 2023.