Fiona Tan @ Frith Street Gallery

In Fiona Tan’s work explorations of memory, time, history and the role of visual images are key. She often deals with notions of representation: how we represent ourselves and the mechanisms that determine how we interpret the representation of others. Photography and film – made by herself, by others, or a combination of both – are her mediums; research, classification and the archive, her strategies. Her skilfully crafted, moving and intensely human works, expanded film and video installations, explore both past and present and our place within them.
The works in this exhibition Elsewhere, have been prompted by utopian literature such as William Morris’ News from Nowhere(1890) and Tommasso Campanella’s The City of the Sun (1623). These novels lead Tan to wonder why our age is so much more inclined to dystopian narratives rather than utopian ones.