Perhaps it’s the height of the ceiling, the reverential hush of the darkened room, or the columns that flank the central space and draw us ever forwards to the image ahead – but there’s something about Fiona Tan’s video work Tomorrow that’s like approaching a secular altarpiece.
The installation has an undeniable physical presence as the sole exhibit on the ground floor of Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art. A giant screen features a slow pan across the individual faces of a line of Swedish schoolchildren, while a smaller screen floats almost mystically in front, revealing the same teenagers in a wider group shot. On the first, they seem slightly pensive, self-conscious, almost uncomfortably aware of the intrusive camera. On the second, they joke with friends, muck about and radiate inner confidence. Surprisingly both panoramic shots were filmed at the same time.
“It’s very much a teenage thing,” says Tan from her studio in Amsterdam. “Teenagers are at that stage where they’re very conscious of what they look like and how they present themselves to the world. There’s a sort of inherent uncertainty that they have built into their image of themselves.”
Tan was born in Indonesia in 1966 to a Chinese father and Australian mother (she even claims to have Scottish blood – and freckles – from her maternal grandfather’s side of the family). Brought up in Australia, she is now based in the Netherlands, but exhibits across the world and has created a body of work that continually examines notions of personal identity and nationality. Tomorrow (shot at a school on the outskirts of Stockholm in 2005) seems to reinforce the notion of strength through a multicultural society. The faces, in detail, might betray a little anxiety about being on the cusp of adulthood but, taken together in all their ethnic hues, present a group portrait of strength and optimism.
“That’s one of the reasons I called the piece Tomorrow,” adds Tan. “In some ways, these are just kids from a pretty normal European school, but obviously they are from all over the place, so they’re the Europe of tomorrow. And I felt that they were almost aware of this.”
Portraiture is central to Tan’s style of work, although she stretches its traditional definitions by working more with the moving image than the photographic still.
Past shows have seen her exhibit life-size video projections of diverse citizens of Berlin (Countenance, 2002) and prisoners and their guards (Correction, 2004). Although she describes filming people standing still and looking straight at the camera as “sort of an anachronism”, the results can be much more revealing than a single static image.
“Because we’re confronted by a lot of photographic images, we’re very well trained at reading them,” she explains. “So we tend to scan a photograph quite quickly at first just to figure out what we’re looking at, and then maybe go back and spend more time after that. You do look at it differently than you look at a painting. But then looking at a moving image is a different engagement again because you’re aware of time passing. You get a certain sense that the person who was filmed is actually looking at you – which is weird and of course you know it’s not true.”
Tan’s “moving” portraits go beyond earlier examples of the form, including those by Andy Warhol, as they seem to present people as people, not merely as artistic subjects. “It’s some sort of trick we do to ourselves,” she suggests. “Occasionally a dog will see itself in a mirror and, for a couple of seconds, bark at it because it’ll think it’s a different dog, until it figures it out and gets disinterested. I think human vision works differently than that because we’re tricked by the mirror for much longer periods of time.”
She laughs, before making a point from first-hand experience. “For example, with the installation Countenance, [viewers] sit down for hours because they somehow engage with every single person who comes by, and it’s almost rude to stand up and go away. There are different rules of behaviour [with moving image portraits] coming into play.”
Last year, Tan was the Dutch representative at the Venice Biennale, presenting the project Disorient. She had already been making a name for herself internationally, but exposure at Venice is currently pushing her further to the fore. Scotland has caught up at last, with another video piece, Downside Up, becoming part of the What You See Is Where You’re At re-hang at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh a mere three weeks before Tomorrow opened as one of the centrepieces of the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art.
Downside Up is something of an optical illusion on first encounter, as a monochrome street scene in Amsterdam – cyclists and pedestrians out on a sunny day – is turned 180 degrees upside down and looped for just over two minutes. It’s more than a cheap trick, however: the shadow, on top, becomes the reality while the person, below, is the reflected image, thus forcing the viewer to reassess the representation of the human body within an art work.
“Shadows are such a fantastic subject to be working with because it’s right at the core of what photography is,” says Tan of this 2002 piece. “Photography is just shadows fixed on paper.”
Of the two works showing here, it’s Tomorrow that seems to have the deeper resonance. In a year when reckless electioneering, issues about asylum seekers and the continuing fallout from the recession will push race further into the spotlight, it’s fitting that there’s a work of art with something positive to say about integration slap-bang in the centre of Scotland’s most multi-cultural city.
You look at those faces of those Swedish teenagers and feel hope. Tomorrow belongs to them.
Tomorrow is at GoMA until September 27. For clips, stills and information on Fiona Tan’s past works, go to www.fionatanvenice.nl/disorient/
