Fiona Tan in conversation with Bart Rutten

The human individual has been a recurrent focus of Fiona Tan’s (*1966) expansive video installations and photographic series. The individuality and personality of the portrayed in her quasi-documentary recordings stand in contrast to collective identity, ethnic affiliation and common history. For the video installation Correction (2004) shown in the exhibition FUTURE PRESENT, the artist presents some 300 life-size video portraits of prisoners and guards from four American jails, shot from the waist up and projected in a loose sequence onto six screens arranged in a circle. Observer and the observed directly face one another in the installation, whereby the clarity of this distinction becomes increasingly blurred.