Mountains and Molehills
October 2, 2022–January 8, 2023
Fiona Tan is known for her video and film installations in which she explores memory, history and the role of images. This exhibition is a journey through a selection of recent works from her oeuvre, in which the passing of time and the role of the landscape as a mental space are recurring themes.
The exhibition focuses on Gray Glass (2020) and Inventory (2012), and the new work Footsteps (2022), which Fiona Tan made at the invitation of Eye. These video installations explore the connections between landscape, environment and humankind, and also the relationships between image, maker and viewer. For Tan, time is both a medium and a vehicle. It is a material that she studies, shapes and processes into artworks – often in combination with still and moving images. In addition, the artist looks at ways of perceiving and representing with a critical but also poetic eye.
New work: Footsteps
In Footsteps, her latest work, Fiona Tan creates connections between personal stories and the world around us. She makes use of material found in the Eye collection – forgotten documentary footage from the early days of silent film revealing scenes of the Netherlands as it was more than a century ago. 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 excerpts from letters she received from her father just after she moved to the Netherlands in the late 1980s. Through his education in Indonesia, Tan’s father knew a lot about the Netherlands without ever having visited the country. In the letters he meanders seamlessly between personal news and world events, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing.
Footsteps is 97 minutes long and is screened daily at set times in the exhibition.
A journey through time and space
Fiona Tan’s work reveals a fascination with archives, museums, collections and depots, and with their accompanying architecture. Where does the human urge to preserve things come from? In the installation Inventory (2012), Tan turns her cameras on the eccentric museum house of the eighteenth-century architect and collector Sir John Soane. Gray Glass (2020) is a large spatial installation in which we follow a lone traveller on his journey across the Alps with a mirror strapped to his back. The title refers to an optical instrument popular with eighteenth-century landscape painters. In Island (2008), we find ourselves in a desolate landscape where time appears to stand still.
Biography
Born in 1966 in Pekan Baru, Indonesia, Fiona Tan grew up in Australia before relocating in the late 1980s to Amsterdam, where she studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten. She has previously worked with Eye on the exhibitions Expanded Cinema (2012), which included her work, and Waiting for the time to pass (2021). She also used material from the Eye collection in News from the Near Future (2003) and Facing Forward (1999).
The work of Fiona Tan is frequently exhibited at and collected by international museums around the world. Recent solo exhibitions took place at the Museum der Moderne, Salzburg; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Musée des arts contemporains Grand Hornu; The Baltic, Gateshead; National Museum of Art Osaka and MAXXI, Rome. In 2009 Tan represented the Netherlands at the Venice Biennale. Her work is included in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; New Museum for Contemporary Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Tate Modern, London.
Publication
The exhibition is accompanied by a publication in separate Dutch and English editions, featuring an essay by Hanneke Grootenboer, an interview by Dana Linssen and texts by the artist herself. The catalogue is lavishly illustrated with installation photos, film stills and photos taken behind the scenes. Published by: Eye Filmmuseum in collaboration with naioıo publishers, Rotterdam. Price: 24.95 EUR.
Public programme
A programme of events has been put together in collaboration with the artist, including film screenings, discussions and presentations in Eye’s cinemas. The Akademie van Kunsten - KNAW is also organising a symposium on the work of Fiona Tan on December 2.
