Transporting the viewer to a very different time and place, Nellie is inspired by the life of Cornelia van Rijn, Rembrandt's illegitimate daughter, who at the age of sixteen emigrated to Batavia (present-day Jakarta). Little is known about Cornelia's life; no portraits of her are known to exist. But this omission from the history books was for the artist an opportunity to give her imagination free reign. With this unsettling work Tan offers a touching homage to a forgotten woman, whose 'suspended history' becomes activated again.

Transporting the viewer to a very different time and place, Nellie is inspired by the life of Cornelia van Rijn, Rembrandt's illegitimate daughter, who at the age of sixteen emigrated to Batavia (present-day Jakarta). Little is known about Cornelia's life; no portraits of her are known to exist. But this omission from the history books was for the artist an opportunity to give her imagination free reign. With this unsettling work Tan offers a touching homage to a forgotten woman, whose 'suspended history' becomes activated again.

A confused old man, Henry, lives on his own in an old empty building that is reminiscent of a deserted palace. Henry hasn't been outside for years. The camera follows a day in his life - his simple daily chores and his eccentric rituals. Henry looks like a European from a good family, but has many Asian habits. The second protagonist is the building in which Henry is staying: the Royal Pavilion in Brighton. It is one of the best preserved examples of chinoise architecture and furnishing in the world. Neither the client nor the architect had ever set foot in Asia. In a monologue, a parallel narrative unfolds in a game with reality and fiction. Word and image, fiction and documentary become intertwined with each other and point across the frontiers of ‘East’ versus ‘West’.

A confused old man, Henry, lives on his own in an old empty building that is reminiscent of a deserted palace. Henry hasn't been outside for years. The camera follows a day in his life - his simple daily chores and his eccentric rituals. Henry looks like a European from a good family, but has many Asian habits. The second protagonist is the building in which Henry is staying: the Royal Pavilion in Brighton. It is one of the best preserved examples of chinoise architecture and furnishing in the world. Neither the client nor the architect had ever set foot in Asia. In a monologue, a parallel narrative unfolds in a game with reality and fiction. Word and image, fiction and documentary become intertwined with each other and point across the frontiers of ‘East’ versus ‘West’.

Island (2008) is a 12-minute black-and-white video that surveys the distinctive terrain of Gotland, an island off the eastern coast of Sweden. Projected on a large wall in Vancouver, Island uses prolonged static shots to immerse the viewer in an austere landscape.

Saint Sebastian was filmed by Fiona Tan at the annual ‘Toshiya’ in Kyoto, a coming-of-age ceremony for women aged twenty in 2001. It was for the first time ever that a film camera was allowed to capture the procedings. Dressed in traditional kimono hundreds of young women perform the Japanese art of archery in a ritual that has persisted for over four centuries, combining female grace and beauty with the typically male skills of physical and mental strength. The monumental video installation is presented on both sides of a large single screen which hangs diagonally in the exhibition space.

Amsterdam-based photographer and video artist Fiona Tan (born 1966) has been a central figure on the contemporary art scene since the 1990s. In her video News from the Near Future (2003) a collage of historic film and audio material tells of man’s ambivalent relationship with water as a force of nature. Drawing on the archives of the Amsterdam Film Museum, Tan composed a narrative crescendo starting off with idyllic impressions of the watery world and building to increasingly menacing scenarios of an unleashed nature. Images of floods and churning seas, of wild winds and storms, parade before our eyes the destructive force of water. Tragedies at sea are reported in the style of old newsreels or radio shows, segueing into pictures of flooded cities that – as indicated in the work’s title – forebode future catastrophes. The cinematic repertoire of waves, tides and floods acts as an historical memory, presenting the sea as a metaphor for the flow of time.

Losing his memory after a mugging, a man known only as 'MP' (Missing Person) leaves his home and sets out on a journey - in search not only for his memory but perhaps also for a new identity. MP finds himself confronted by a world in which there are no longer any certainties; an era of crisis on many levels. On his travels from country to country, portrayed via an associative image montage and through a series of strange, illuminating, sometimes comic encounters, MP attempts to gain insight into the complexity of life in the 21st-century West - into what commentators have called an age of 'rolling catastrophe'.

In Footsteps, Fiona Tan creates connections between personal stories and the world around us. The footage shows children at play and Dutch windmills, but above all people engaged in heavy physical labour in the countryside and in factories. In a fascinating juxtaposition, she combines these images with excerpts from letters she received from her father just after she moved to the Netherlands in the late 1980s. Through his education in Indonesia, Tan’s father knew a lot about the Netherlands without ever having visited the country. In the letters, he meanders seamlessly between personal news and world events, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing.