Fiona Tan is a sensitive and analytical witness of her time. Her contribution to last year’s Venice Biennale at the Dutch Pavilion drew a great deal of attention. Bringing together Tan’s most recent work in photography and film, as well as selected drawings, in a large-scale presentation, the exhibition Rise and Fall at the Aargauer Kunsthaus is the first comprehensive survey of the artist’s work in Switzerland.

Born in Indonesia and raised in Australia, Fiona Tan has been living in the Netherlands for over twenty years now. Straddling the East-West divide, she embarks on a journey to trace her own roots in her documentary film May You Live in Interesting Times (1997). A preoccupation with memory and history thematically underpins her artistic practice. Her more recent photographic works and video pieces, such as Rise and Fall (2009), Provenance (2008) or A Lapse of Memory (2007), revolve as much around issues of identity and belonging as around remembering and forgetting. In her double-projection video piece Rise and Fall the artist examines the retrospective gaze and its relationship to the images we carry within ourselves.