Concrete Playground

If we believe the American travel writer Paul Theroux, "travel is glamorous only in retrospect". It is on reflection that we beautify and sculpt our previous experiences, assembling the pieces into stories that can be passed on to other ears with, well, a kind of retrospective glamour. Fiona Tan, an Australian-born artist living in Holland, approaches the past with a similar inclination; history is used imaginatively for films that seem to be alluring for the very patience they convey. In fact, spending a considerable time in the glow of Tan’s A Lapse of Memory (exhibited at the National Art School Gallery) and Disorient (shown at Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation), confirmed a rare skill with the moving image — although not much appears to happen, her stories are nevertheless compelling.

In Disorient, we follow a curious camera as it moves over sensuous and eclectic objects, arranged both chaotically and specifically, in an indeterminate space. Audible is a steady and inward voice, and as we listen to the narrator reflect on distant and unfamiliar lands, we have to suspect that this collection of objects are the imagined rewards and treasures of an early adventure. After some lightweight research, it's revealed that this voice is in the service of Marco Polo, the 13th century merchant and writer of Description of the World (or Il Milione) who introduced Europe to central Asia and China. Polo was more or less a loner, and his language reveals an observant isolation, which Tan accentuates with her arrangement of sequestered objects.

Similarly, this rather subduing theme of isolation is continued in A Lapse of Memory, where we move through an extravagantly regal but aging palace with Henry, Tan’s invented character who performs senility and eccentricity with effective persuasion. Here, Tan narrates the film herself, revealing to us some thoughts behind the images and the confused Henry, while also remaining vague enough to deny total explanation. This magnificent context congeals with the antiqued Henry to form a kind of Vogue Living portrait of dementia.

While I should warn you that Coming Home requires time, it would not be ill spent with Tan’s images; you just have to think of the glamorous reward, in retrospect of course.