Dissassembling the Archive: Fiona Tan
by Philip Monk
Art Gallery of York University, 2007
6x9 in, 232 pp, 29 col, 99 B&W, hardcover
ISBN 978-0-921972-45-7
Design: Bryan Gee
“A quasi-fictional correspondence with the artist Fiona Tan. It departs from interpretations of post-colonial identity issues in her work to trace the implications of the archival housing of photographs and moving images. By way of a detour through Siegfried Kracrauer’s writing on photography and Jacques Derrida’s writing on the Freudian impression, we witness — right before our eyes — the disintegrative and destructive effect of photography on the archive.” – From the AGYU website
In the book design I chose to put a primary focus on Tan’s 2 channel digital installation The Changling, pacing the typography through the extent of curator Philip Monk’s text so that every page of it is confronted with a full bleed image of one of the nearly 200 portraits of Japanese schoolgirls from a 1929 school yearbook who in the installation are projected as a loop. The photos confront the reader relentlessly, disrupting the one-sided epistolary text, where Monk, addressing an absent Tan, discusses among other things, Siegfried Kracrauer’s theories of photography. The portraits have the effect of challenging both author and reader as if Tan herself is present in the exchange.
Exploiting the object quality of the book helped achieve the immersive cinematic experience I was after and brought me closer to a strategy I am now developing in my current visual novel project.