Peter Freeman, Inc. is pleased to present Archive / Ruins, Fiona Tan’s first solo exhibition in New York City in the past ten years. The exhibition marks the U.S. premiere of her new film Archive (2019), and the world-premiere of Ruins (2020). Related works, the audio track Hydriotaphia (2016), and the series of photogravures, Shadow Archive (2019), will also be on view.
To create Archive, Tan conducted extensive research on the Belgian visionary and peace activist Paul Otlet (1868–1944). Otlet’s Mundaneum, also known as the “paper Google,” encompassed an ambitious plan to catalogue all human knowledge in the hope of achieving world peace. In Archive, we wander within the interior of the fictional architecture Tan designed to house Otlet’s utopian archive. But like his deteriorating papers and documents, Tan’s futuristic, circular structure is already desolate and falling to ruin. Filmed inside a virtual 3-D full-scale model, Archive is meticulously constructed entirely from computer-generated imagery and is the artist’s first foray into this technology.
Ruins, a two-screen projection created using both 16 mm analogue film and high definition digital video features imagery filmed on location in an abandoned mining complex at the Grand-Hornu in Belgium, a World Heritage site and ruin in itself. “Inside a ruin,” says Tan, “I feel as though I can glimpse time in motion. I am witness to a drawn-out collapse that is taking place before my very eyes in agonizingly slow motion. A ruin simultaneously shows me a building’s past, present, and future. I see time moving forwards and backward as if on film.” In her translation of these two opposing languages, Ruins traces parallels between her architectural subject-matter and the media at-hand, questioning the future of both analog and digital moving image.
The artist book, Fiona Tan: A Walk Among Ruins, published on the occasion of the exhibition, includes an essay Tan wrote while working on her latest installation Ruins. The two-volume monograph Fiona Tan: L’Archive des ombres / Shadow Archive (2019) is also available.
Fiona Tan, who is based in Amsterdam, has attracted international recognition for her film and video projects since the end of the 1990s. Oscillating between documentation and fiction, biography and imagination, Tan’s work is informed by her acknowledgment of the camera as an agent provocateur, rather than an instrument for recording reality. Deeply embedded in all of Tan’s work is her fascination with the deceptive nature of representation and the play of memory across time and space.
Recent solo exhibitions include Sprengel Museum, Hannover (2019); Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2019); MAC’s Grand-Hornu, Belgium (2019); De Pont Museum, the Netherlands (2017); Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2017); MMK, Frankfurt (2016), Mudam, Luxembourg (2016); Guggenheim, Bilbao (2016); Izu Photo Museum, Japan (2016); The Baltic, United Kingdom (2015); Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo (2015); the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2013); MAXXI, Rome (2013). In New York, her work has been included in group exhibitions and screenings at the Museum of Modern Art, the New Museum, ICP, and Film Forum. Tan represented the Netherlands at the 53rd Venice Biennale with her solo presentation Disorient (2009). Major public collections include the Tate Modern, London; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; National Galerie, Berlin; New Museum, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Philadelphia Museum of Art; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; among others.
A reception for the artist will be held Thursday 9 January, from 6 to 8 pm. An artist’s statement is available upon request. For reproduction requests, interviews with the artist and general inquiries, please contact the gallery at 212-966-5154 or info@peterfreemaninc.com.