Fiona Tan

This Reader, edited and introduced by noted art historian and critic Gilda Williams, gathers the key critical writings across the artist's essential works as explored through the lens of art history, post-colonial theory, film analysis, and more. Catalogue essays and exhibition reviews on individual works are set alongside Tan's own substantial body of writing: essays, letters, scripts, project notes, as well as discussions of other -artists' work, from Chantal Akerman to Jeff Wall.

Tan places works by G ricault, Goya, Ensor, Messerschmidt and more in dialogue with her own multimedia installation to explore past and present depictions of mental illnessMultimedia artist Fiona Tan (born 1966) takes Th odore G ricault's Portrait of a Kleptomaniac as the starting point in her quest to understand 19th-century psychiatry. This work, and other contemporary depictions of monomania and mental illness, becomes a part of Tan's new video installation, Janine's Room. This book was published in association with Rijksmuseum Amsterdam.

The Dutch artist Fiona Tan is well known for her photography, film, and video installations in which she frequently addresses ideas of identity, memory, and history. This publication documents recent works including a new large-scale project commissioned by the Grand-Hornu Museum of Contemporary Arts in Mons, Belgium and presented here for the first time. This work, titled Shadow Archive, is inspired by Paul Otlet (1868-1944), considered to be one of the forefathers of information science. Shadow Archive deals in particular with Otlet's decades-long utopian quest to establish a central repository for the world's information; between 1919 and 1934, Otlet and his team assembled more than 16 million index cards of data. This book incorporates previously unpublished original drawings and notes drafted by Otlet and selected by Fiona Tan for her installation; an amazing archive which reveal his visionary and creative personality as well as his exploration of the limits of the human knowledge. Text in English and French.

Fiona Tan has occupied a pivotal position with­in contemporary art since the late 1990s; her moving-image and photographic artworks are familiar from many key international biennials and exhibitions. Fiona Tan explores history and time and our place within them, working within the contested territory of representation. Deeply ­embedded in all of Fiona Tan's work 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. Both books mark the occasion of Fiona Tan's first extensive mid-career retrospective, ­presented concurrently at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg and Kunsthalle Krems. The exhibition cata­logue ­dis­cusses the works drawn from two decades shown across both ­venues, including the newly com­missioned video works GRAY GLASS and PICKPOCKETS.