The Changeling
Opening Tuesday, June 15, 2010, Wako Works of Art is very pleased to present an exhibition of digital installation by Fiona Tan. This will be Tan’s fourth solo exhibition at the gallery.
The Changeling by Fiona Tan is an installation comprised of double facing monitors: on one side, slowly changing photograph after photograph of Japanese schoolgirls in their uniforms and regulation haircuts, and on the other, a still portrait of a single classmate. The voice-over accompanying the solo girl, in painstaking awareness of her mother and her grandmother’s careful watch, quietly reflects upon herself and her struggle in coming-of-age and finding her own words.
The title of this work is in reference to a “creature from Old English and Nordic mythology who, as the child of an elf pixie or gnome, is swapped for a human child. In association with this mythology, ‘changeling’ is also understood as a role playing game in which the participants slip into different character roles and thus play themselves as well as others.” (Thorsten Sadowky, “With Other Eyes”. Fiona Tan Mirror Maker. Kehrer Verlag, p. 62)
The work is Tan’s exploration on the role of the voice-over and narrative, and its relationship to image. This work was first shown in England in 2006 with a voice-over by Fiona Shaw, and later adapted for numerous countries and languages for the artist’s traveling exhibition. The Japanese version, which was first shown in the Yokohama Image and Film Festival in 2009, is read by Junko Uchida.
Fiona Tan
Born in 1966 in Indonesia and raised in Australia, Fiona Tan was educated at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Through the use of found and self-shot film and photographs, Fiona Tan’s works elaborate on the nature of archival and archaeological material, dislocation and relocation, and the conditions of time and memory, history and fiction. Her works have been shown in numerous group exhibitions, such as the 49th Venice Biennale (2001), the first Yokohama Triennial (2001), Documenta 11 (2002). From 2004 to 2005,Tan’s solo exhibition Correction was shown at New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and UCLA Hammer Museum; her other solo exhibition Mirror Maker has travelled to Denmark, Austria, Norway and Finland, and was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photo Prize in 2007. In 2009, Tan was selected to represent in the Dutch Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, which was met with high acclaim. Her latest exhibition, Rise and Fall, is traveling 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, and teaches at de Ateliers in Amsterdam.