Fiona Tan's Disorient to Represent the Dutch Pavilion at La Biennale di Venezia

Fiona Tan, Disorient, 2009. HD installation, colour, 5:1 surround, 2 HD-cam safety masters, 2 HD projectors, 2 computers, surround amplifier, surround speakers, edition of 4 © Fiona Tan, courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London.

Fiona Tan's Disorient to Represent the Dutch Pavilion at La Biennale di Venezia
(Source ArtDaily)
VENICE.- New York-based Dutch curator Saskia Bos selected Fiona Tan to represent the Netherlands at the 53rd International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. Tan is working on a new audio-visual installation conceived especially for the presentation in Venice.

Fiona Tan describes herself as ‘a professional foreigner, whose identity is defined by that which I am not’. Her work will never be a straightforward search for truth or identity: she uses a variety of means to unravel processes of recollection and fill in story lines, sometimes using found footage with which to confront the observer with informal history. Through professional analysis and the poetic translation of her observations, she creates images that become symbols of the fading memory of a fast-changing world. Her installations and films are the result of her ongoing investigation into representation and the role of images and portraits in contemporary culture. Sometimes Tan’s work refers to what is known in art history as ‘provenance’. This was also the title of a recent installation by Tan at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, in which she used surprising means to translate the 17th-century gaze into the present day.

For the Biennale, a new work by Tan will refer to Venice’s pivotal position in the history of geostrategy in the time before the discovery of new routes to Asia diluted the city’s power. Tan’s fascination with geography, travellers and their journeys has led her to explore the biographies of famous merchants and the desire to acquire new experiences and possessions. Her project Disorient attempts to bridge the centuries by creating connections with both contemporary day-to-day reality and with the symbolic past that every visitor to Venice wants to grasp.

Fiona Tan (b. 1966) has lived and worked in Amsterdam for more than 20 years. The daughter of a Chinese father and an Australian mother, she was born in Indonesia, but the country’s repressive regime drove her family to Australia. She went on to study in Germany and the Netherlands, which makes her past comparable to that of an immigrant family or a child of the diaspora.
http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=31246