Fiona Tan’s “Footsteps” Through a Dutch Film Archive
By Deborah Schultz
Installation view of FIONA TAN’s Footsteps, 2022, archival film with hand-painted color and sound: 97 mins, at "Footsteps", Frith Street Gallery, London, 2023. Courtesy Frith Street Gallery.
Nov 24, 2023–Jan 20, 2024
Fiona Tan: “Footsteps”
Frith Street Gallery
London
How does one represent change, historically, politically, and personally? In “Footsteps,” Fiona Tan’s most recent exhibition at Frith Street Gallery’s industrial-like space in central London, the artist-filmmaker with Indonesian, Chinese, and Australian heritage explored the ebbs and flows of geopolitics in relation to her personal history.
The exhibition’s main component was the 97-minute film Footsteps (2022), accompanied by two photogravure and spit-bite aquatint prints, Technicolor Dreaming V and Technicolor Dreaming VI (both 2022), of sailing boats and an ensemble of Dutch children, respectively. The artist selected the material for Footsteps from hundreds of hours of historic footage in Amsterdam’s Eye Filmmuseum, a 75-year-old public institution dedicated to films of artistic value. The prints were produced in two stages: first, black-and-white stills deriving from the film footage were printed from a photogravure plate, then sections were overprinted in color to resemble the hand-colored footage in the archival film.
FIONA TAN, Footsteps, 2022, still from archival film with hand-painted color and sound: 97 mins. Courtesy Frith Street Gallery.
In Footsteps, Tan brought together film segments spanning 1896 to the late 1920s of everyday activities in the Netherlands, a period when mechanization gradually impacted Dutch lives. Scenes demonstrated the tremendous labor of people by the sea, at the harbor, and in the fields, with seemingly little time for leisure. For the most part, they were oblivious to being filmed, too busy cleaning fish, cutting wheat, churning butter, weaving nets, and efficiently performing other tasks. At moments, the subjects look at the camera directly, their expressions a mixture of naive curiosity and self-consciousness. A sense of community pervades the footage, as people work together harmoniously. The varied colors of the original film added further evidence of impressive manual work while also highlighting the artifice of documentary material.
Juxtaposed against the historical footage were excerpts from letters that Tan’s Indonesian-Chinese father sent to her in the late 1980s while she attended art school in Amsterdam. At times, the personal overlapped with the historical, for instance, the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square were keenly followed by Tan’s father, who informed his daughter about both global events and their family in China and Indonesia, with whom he was in contact. His fluid yet precise writing wove the public and private spheres together in a perceptive account of the changing times. Voiced by Scottish actor Ian Henderson in a warm, steady accent, the father’s words perfectly offset the narration of momentous geopolitical changes, including a major earthquake in Armenia, the fall of Communism in the former USSR, the release of Nelson Mandela in South Africa, and the tumultuous change of Governor-General in Australia. The silent-film footage was sensitively animated by both the voiceover and by Hugo Dijkstal’s soundtrack, which added sounds of the sea, laughter, and work activities. Imageless segues and slight asynchronization brought the viewer back to the present, reminding them of the constructed nature of the film.
Installation view of FIONA TAN’s Footsteps, 2022, archival film with hand-painted color and sound: 97 mins, at "Footsteps", Frith Street Gallery, London, 2023. Courtesy Frith Street Gallery.
While in Footsteps, Tan continued to explore her concerns with the representation of history, memory, and place, the film also addressed experiences of migration, not only of Tan to the Netherlands, but also of her father from Indonesia to Australia, where he moved for his studies. With her contemporary lens, Tan weaves environmental issues through the chosen material, portraying increasing industrialization and excerpting her father’s comments on flooding and fires. Across multiple chapters, the 97 minutes of the film provided space for the viewer to reflect on how we deal with change both within our lives and in the world around us.
Throughout Footsteps, complex issues were addressed with a light touch, a quality of Tan’s work alluded to in the title. In her publication Mountains and Molehills (2022), produced to accompany a major exhibition of her work at the Eye Filmmuseum, Tan noted a hand-painted sign in the Rogers State Park that read: “Leave only footsteps, take only memories,” aptly characterizing her masterful and thoughtful engagement with archival material.
FIONA TAN, Footsteps, 2022, still from archival film with hand-painted color and sound: 97 mins. Courtesy Frith Street Gallery.
