London based, Singapore-born artist Erika Tan’s 3-screen installation Persistent Visions is opening at NUS Museum on Friday Night, 11/9/09. Persistent Visions is counter programmed against I, Polunin, about the films and photographs of Ivan Polunin. In her piece, she draws upon the “visual materials collected individuals on various colonising missions and deposited in the archive of the Empire and Commonwealth Museum, Bristol”. The two works echo nicely against each other and hers is well worth standing through, all 24 minutes of it. We both hope the Polunin’s work will stay in Singapore, and won’t end up in Bristol.
As part of the opening, Erika Tan and I will be chatting. We will talk about our experience making work about/around archives. I will show a bit of 9th August where I processed through 40 years of national day parades and chat about Invisible City. We will both touch on artistic strategies we employ in making work about history.
Ivan Polunin’s gear, featured in I, Polunin, cameras, audio recorders, players of evey format, generation used to make his images