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Footsteps

2022

High definition video installation

Black & white/tinted/hand-coloured, surround sound, 4:3 image ratio

97 min. loop, commences every 100 min.

HD video projector, surround amplifier and speakers, media player

Front projection screen minimum dimensions 3 x 2.25 m

Brief Description

Footsteps (2022) combines archival footage from the collection of Amsterdam’s Eye Filmmuseum with a voiceover of letters written to the artist by her father while she was a student in the late 1980s. The artist added a soundtrack to the film that reflects the action and events taking place, bringing the century-old archival footage to life. As we listen to Tan’s father write about the fall of the Soviet Union, civil unrest in China, and the everyday lives of the artist’s relatives in Australia, we watch men and women toil the land and harvest the sea, we see cows in the field and old men smoking pipes, sailboats moving across the horizon and the emergence of industry and urbanisation.

Although the footage captures a nation as it makes a transition from an agrarian to an industrial society, what emerges from the film is not a portrait of the Netherlands at the dawn of modernity nor an autobiography of the artist, but a poignant study of how anyone might contend with political and technological change. Although the letters are intimate, they are also as historically compelling as the archival footage. The juxtaposition of the personal and impersonal invites the viewer to reflect on both the significance and the ephemerality of all lives – at the dawn of the century, in the recent past, and in the present day.