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 our eyes—the disintegrative and destructive effect of photography on the archive. This volume is printed on several papers and features full bleed video stills, mesmerizing archival portraits of young Asian girls in identical uniforms and a long text in the form of philosophical letters "from" Philip Monk—who curated the 2006 exhibition at Toronto's Art Gallery of York University on which this volume is based.