Biography

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 and combines the two in expanded film and video installations. Crossing the threshold of early 20th Century missionaries' and travellers' reportages, which served to reinforce the sense of 'place' of Africans and Asians in the colonial hierarchy of power, Tan interlinks personal and social formations of identity.

Central to Fiona Tan's work is the human subject. She questions and explores the complexities of culture and place, and how these elements come to shape our individual identity.