Opening Friday, 30 October, 6–8pm
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 across three screens, spatially positioned to imply the projected reconstruction of the titular scholar’s office. Filmed on 35mm analogue film and subsequently transferred to digital formats, the middle screen is presented in the CinemaScope standard of 2.39:1 and the right-most screen in the image ratio of 16:9, while the left-most screen was filmed in the early cinema standard format of 4:3. The center and right-hand screens focus on Janine as she doggedly pursues her work, while the left-hand screen introduces a montage of text, effectively a written voice-over: fragments of Tan’s own reflections interspersed with excerpts from 19th–21st century psychiatric patient logs and letters. Sand or dust appear to be continuously raining down, covering and diffusing any attempts at order or control. Unsettling film extracts and still images ripple in dreamlike flashbacks across the three screens, flowing seamlessly between the central vignettes, and encouraging the lines between physical reality and mental perception to blur.
Inspired in part by W.G. Sebald’s novel Rings of Saturn (2002), Tan has deemed Janine’s Room an “exercise in empathy.” Taking Sebald’s visually rich text as a stimulus, Tan combines archival footage, medical records, and her own dreams and fantasies in an effort to counteract the invisibility of mental disorders and find ways to approach the psyche visually, haptically, and physically. The work’s inaugural presentation was 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 for Monomania are also 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, Japan; 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 solo exhibition now on view at Planting Fields Foundation on Long Island.