Fiona Tan: Disassembling the Archive

Exceptionally well designed, engaging and mysterious, Disassembling the Archive is a quasi-fictional correspondence with the Amsterdam-based, Indonesia-born artist Fiona Tan. It departs from interpretations of postcolonial identity issues in Tan's work to trace the implications of the archival housing of photographs and moving images. By way of a detour through Siegfried Kracrauer's writing on photography and Jacques Derrida's writing on the Freudian impression, we witness—right before…