Venice Biennale (Fiona Tan)

A few buildings over from Miquel Barcelò's work, I found an exhibition of videos entitled disorient by Fiona Tan, which I found very thoughtful and engaging. In the large room in the back was a video installation with one video of many fine traded goods from all over the world on shelves in a storeroom on one wall and on the opposite wall was a video of contemporary lives of people from the various countries being described by a narrator. It turns out the narration were of a man reading Marco Polo's writings from his journals while traveling. He speaks about all these luxurious goods and how wonderful they are, yet is very demeaning towards the people who make them, treating them as sub-human. The video of these people show the bad conditions in which they live and work, a lot of hardship, and through this juxtaposition of past and present, we understand that not much has changed since Marco Polo sailed the world in the 1200's. This piece deals a lot with natural history and exploration in terms of how we document societies and cultures, and plays on both objective and subjective realities. While this video was very socially oriented and related strongly to Venice's history (through Marco Polo), there were much more personal works of Tan's in the front spaces of the building.

There was a series of videos taken in a vertical format and in black and white (or limited color so it was nearly black and white), that had very slow motions of people, and with slow pans so that they looked more like photographs. I thought this created an interesting dialogue between the photographic and video in terms of what a motion-picture means and how motion in an image affects our understanding and later memory of a subject. That they were in black and white made further references to photography, and also changed my sense of time, though because they are videos, it is almost like they are stories of past and present. Old photographs are in black and white, yet so are newspapers, and these videos felt like they existed in black and white in order to be in that ambiguous space where we don't know whether we are in a time that has long passed or this present one.

There was one other work, which was projected onto two large vertical screens that were hanging next to one another. On the left screen came images of an elderly woman, and on the right screen came correspondant images of her younger self in similar situations. Sometimes the screens would both come to the same place and time, such as the old woman lying in bed, or a waterfall, and sometimes they would be aligned, but often they were temporally displaced by just a second or two. That there were two screens that showed different parts and that they were aligned vertically made the videos feel like fragements, which further emphasized that they were about memory and the act of remembering. The work was very quiet and contemplative, exploring how we come to know ourselves through time. I found the metaphors that she drew out between the women and movements of water--over a waterfall, the fall of rain, in the bath and shower--very compelling, and very much related to the idea of Tao. For a little while, we were awash with this woman in her thoughts and memories, growing and dying with her, falling right over the edge of rock and not knowing what we have forgotten. We were on her river, moving with her.