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 Fiona Tan
«Thin Cities»

Fiona Tan’s works engage the traditional dialectic between the ethnographic claim to veritable objectivity of unprejudiced witness and the personal travelogue as the search for the subjective. She draws on photographic and filmic footage from various archives and combines the two into expanded film and video installations. Traversing the threshold of early 20th-century missionaries’ and travelers’ reportages, which served to reinforce the ‹place› of Africans and Asians in th colonial hierarchy of power, Tan interlinks personal and social formations of identity. [...] In the multiple film projections »Facing Forward« (1998/1999) and »Thin Cities« (1999/2000), an architectonic environment is created that forces the viewer to physically experience the spectacular character of colonial footage by walking through and around the projection screens.

(source: Nadja Rottner, Fiona Tan, in: Documenta 11_Platform 5: Exhibition. Short Guide, Ostfildern, p. 218.)