Peter Freeman, Inc. is pleased to present Fiona Tan: Janine’s Room, the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. Tan has garnered global acclaim for her skillfully crafted video installations, photographs, and films that explore the myriad of ways visual images address and complicate notions of memory, time, and history. The focal point of the exhibition, Janine’s Room, is a large scale, 4K video installation presented across three screens of varying dimensions, centered on the titular scholar as she doggedly pursues her work over the course of a single day. As the camera pans across her workspace, situational and atmospheric obstacles blur the lines between physical reality and mental perception. Unsettling archival footage and still images are interspersed in dreamlike flashbacks across the three screens. Textual fragments communicating the protagonist’s inner thoughts and intellectual pursuit are also integrated into the montage, alongside excerpts from psychiatric patient records and letters.
This will be the work’s North American premiere following its inaugural presentation at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum in Fiona Tan: Monomania (2025), an exhibition curated by Tan which centered on visual portrayals of mental disorders in the 19th century. A group of collages born from Tan’s research and reading for Monomania will also be on view.
Fiona Tan (b. 1966, Pekan Baru, Indonesia) lives and works in Amsterdam. In 2009, she represented the Netherlands at the 53rd La Biennale di Venezia with Disorient, a two-channel high definition video installation commissioned for the Dutch Pavilion. Tan’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Neue National Galerie, Berlin; Pola Museum, Hakone; Rijksmuseum Amsterdam; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and Tate Modern, London. Janine’s Room runs concurrently with Catalyst 2026: Fragment of the Foundations for a Babel Tower, Tan’s upcoming exhibition opening this October at Planting Fields Foundation on Long Island.
