MONS.- The MAC’s is presenting Shadow Archive, the first monograph exhibition in Belgium by Fiona Tan, a renowned international artist who for the past 20 years has been exploring the realms of memory through her installations that combine photographs, videos, films, drawings and archive documents.

Resulting from her residence at the MAC's, we shall discover here a brand new piece called Archive, produced specially for the exhibition and the outcome of her research into the Paul Otlet archives conserved at the Mundaneum in Mons.

The internationally renowned visual artist, Fiona Tan has been exploring the territories of memory and identity in her installations since the end of the 1990s, mixing photographs, videos and films, as she has also done in her artist books.

In 2009, she represented the Netherlands at the Venice Biennial. Specially conceived for the Dutch Pavilion, Disorient’s starting point was The Travels of Marco Polo, written seven hundred years ago by the eponymous Venetian merchant. In 2016, Fiona Tan directed Ascent, a two part installation and a feature film created from a montage of more than four thousand photographs of Mount Fuji that date back 150 years. At the heart of her work, she questions the role of images, the impact they generate, and the relationship that binds us to them. She is also concerned with movement and immobility and the different possibilities of representing them through photography and film.

“I look at how we look, especially at photographs and moving images”, she writes in a letter she sent to John Berger, author of the must-read Voir le voir. In her film, Kingdom of Shadows (2000), she interviews four people about the relationship they have with photographic images, and confides, in counterpoint, that she considers the act of watching a creative act in itself. Though Fiona Tan persists in tirelessly investigating our gaze and the status of images, her attention has recently expanded to explore new questions. It focuses on the impulses that drive people to collect, to archive and keep, and on the power that archives have to “represent and interpret history and the place of man in it”.

It is this recent axis that integrates Shadow Archive, the important monographic exhibition dedicated to Fiona Tan’s work, being presented at the MAC’s from 7 April 2019.

Articulated in two parts, the exhibition begins with Depot (2015) and Inventory (2012), works that initiated her reflections on museums, collections and archives. In them, she has filmed, respectively, the treasures in the natural science museum reserves in Leiden and Berlin, as well as the unusual collection of the neoclassical (18th-century) architect Sir John Soane, comprising hundreds of objects from the Greco-Roman period.

Extending this first part of the exhibition, Fiona Tan then reveals the result of two years of research that she conducted, at the invitation of the MAC’s, at the Mundaneum – sometimes described as the Paper Google – in Mons. Founded by Paul Otlet, the father of documentation, and the jurist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Henri La Fontaine, the Mundaneum holds millions of thematic index cards that have withstood the tests of time and war.

Paul Otlet’s ambition was to catalogue all human knowledge in order to build world peace, and to classify it with the help of the CDU, the universal decimal classification system, of which he was the inventor.

Challenged by Otlet’s visionary yet eccentric personality, Fiona Tan drew inspiration from his manuscript documents, where the circle of the universe of Jorge Luis Borges appears; and more particularly from his short story ‘The Circular Ruins’ – as well as from De Umbris Idearum by Giordano Bruno – to create an ambitious and poetic project centred on memory and narrative, and straddling fiction and reality.

For the first time, Fiona Tan presents an important set of new works, consisting of drawings, photogravures and texts. Along with two imposing large scale installations, the artist has selected a series of drawings, notes and unpublished documents by Paul Otlet, all of which are being presented to the public for the first time. The exhibition became an opportunity for her to explore new techniques with a film made entirely from computer-generated images; and to achieve the realization of a monumental work that is invested within the space of the last room of the museum –recalling, among other evocations, the changing room with rows of clothing suspended on cables from pulleys, common to all coal mines.