- Dates: December 22, 2016–March 19, 2017
- Curator: Manuel Cirauqui
- Film & Video Gallery (103)
From December 22, 2016, through March 19, 2017, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao will present Fiona Tan’s work Disorient (2009) for the first time in Spain. This is the ninth piece programmed in the Film & Video gallery since it opened in 2014 as a space dedicated to video art, video installation and the moving image.
Fiona Tan (Sumatra, 1966) produced Disorient in 2009 for the Dutch Pavilion of the 53rd Venice Biennale, where it was also partially staged and shot. In fact, the film reflects the history of Venice as a strategic center for the trade of goods from newly charted Asian territories in the 13th to 16th centuries. Tan’s film evokes the dream of a “great Orient”, as described by Marco Polo in his famous Book of the Marvels of the World. This collection of tales, now seven centuries old, inspired in Europe the image of a fairytale and fantastic Orient, rich in millenary cultures open for the first time to European knowledge; a cliché manipulated, also for centuries, to mask the exploitation of peoples and resources. This paradox impregnates the different elements in Fiona Tan’s installation.