A newly-commissioned video installation by Fiona Tan is the first in a series of projects jointly developed by and presented at the MCA; The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, with the purpose of stimulating the creation of new work by artists not yet known in the United States. For her video installations, Tan often uses both archival and new footage, recording people in their native countries. Her new work, Correction, will include several hundred portraits of prisoners and prison guards filmed at correctional institutions in the U.S. Tan’s project portrays a cross-section of inmates and guards, drawing attention to the multitude of citizens whom she feels society prefers to lock away and keep out of sight. Tan, who works in both film and video, will employ what cinematographers in Germany describe as Amerikanisch, the classical medium-portrait shot in film, revealing her interest in incorporating sociological and anthropological principles into the relationship between the still and moving image.
Tan was born in 1966 in Indonesia and currently resides in the Netherlands. The exhibition will be curated by Manilow Senior Curator Francesco Bonami with Assistant Curator Julie Rodrigues Widholm.