disorient Format: Paperback

With her new work Disorient, Fiona Tan represents the Netherlands at the fifty-third Venice Biennale. Her audio-visual installation refers to Venice’s pivotal position in the history of geostrategy in the time before the discovery of new routes to Asia diluted the city’s power.

Fiona Tan describes herself as "a professional foreigner, whose identity is defined by that which I am not." Her recent notable exhibitions include the Vancouver Art Gallery; Freer Galleries, Washington; New Orleans Biennial; New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; ICP Triennial, New York; Documenta 11, Kassel; and the forty-ninth Venice Biennale.

Fiona Tan's (b. 1966 in Indonesia) installations and films are the result of her ongoing investigation into representation and the role of images and portraits in contemporary culture. Saskia Bos is curator of the Dutch Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale and Dean of the School of Art at The Cooper Union, New York. Formerly director of the De Appel centre for contemporary art in Amsterdam, she curated many large-scale exhibitions like the 2nd Berlin Biennale, the 1988 Venice Biennale (co-curator of Aperto). Grenville is senior curator at the Vancouver Art Gallery. He has organized many group exhibitions and was the founding editor of the YYZ Books: Critical Works series, and is a former Toronto editor of Parachute magazine. Doris von Drathen is an art historian and critic specialized in monographic essays and books. She was guest professor at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, the Architectural Association in London, and Cornell University Ithaca; she is currently teaching at the Ecole Spéciale d'Architecture in Paris.Her monographic studies include books on Rebecca Horn, Pat Steir, Rui Chafes and Jannis Kounellis.