Fiona Tan
'Rise and Fall' and New Works
September 10 - October 15, 2011
Reception for the artist: Saturday, September 10, 6-8PM

Opening Saturday, September 10, 2011, Wako Works of Art is very pleased to present an exhibition of works by Fiona Tan. The artist's highly acclaimed video installation Rise and Fall, exhibited in the Dutch Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale, will be shown together with two new works, Brendan's Isle (2010) and Hans and Helge (2011). This will be the artist's fifth solo show at the gallery.

Rise and Fall is a two-channel video installation using vertical format screens. With juxtaposed images of gentle streams and rapid gushes of water, the work unravels to depict a portrait of a woman living in isolation, and caught in the memories of her past. The subtly skewed sense of time and location of the moving images reveal the frailty of memory, and the human inclination to depend on those images. Brendan's Isle is an audio piece, told by Tan herself, of a story of a 6th-Century Irish monk named Brendan, who travels in search of an illusive, paradise of an island. Hans and Helge, the newest work in this exhibition, is a video work filmed on the Swedish island of Gotland. This film is a small, intimate portrait, which quietly observes islanders going about their daily lives.

The fourth installment of the gallery's Text book series, featuring essays on works by Fiona Tan, will be published in conjunction with this exhibition. (Available in Japanese only)

This exhibition is sponsored in part by the Royal Netherlands Embassy in Japan, and with the cooperation of Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada.

Please join us for a reception for the artist on Saturday, September 10, from 6 to 8 PM.

For more information and reproduction quality images, please contact the gallery at +81(0)3-6447-1820 or info@wako-art.jp.

» Press Release(PDF)

Born in Pekan Baru, Indonesia in 1966 and raised in Australia, Fiona Tan was educated at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Through the use of the film and photographic medium, Tan’s works reflect on the human conditions in relation to time and memory, history and fiction, location and dislocation. Her works have been shown in numerous group exhibitions, such as the 49th Venice Biennale (2001), the first Yokohama Triennale (2001), Documenta 11 (2002). In 2009, Tan was selected to represent in the Dutch Pavilion at the Venice Biennale; the following year, she was commissioned by the Fukutake Naoshima Foundation to create a work for the Venice Architectural Biennale, that captures the changes taking place on the island of Inujima in the Seto Inland Sea with the arrival of the new Kazuyo Sejima pavilions. Her latest solo exhibition, Rise and Fall, traveled from Aargauer Kunsthaus, Switzerland, Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada, Freer and Sackler Galleries, Washington DC and Galerie de l'UQAM in Montreal. She is currently based in the Netherlands.