We hadn’t realized it until we saw this image, but it seems that few things are quite as disturbing as seeing a dead, googly-eyed turtle suspended in a jar. Thanks must be extended, then, to Amsterdam-based artist Fiona Tan. Tan works across photography, film and video installations to explore themes of memory and identity, and on 7 April she will be opening a new show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Grand-Hornu (MAC’s) entitled Shadow Archive. The two-part show focuses on Tan’s investigations into “the impulses that drive people to collect, to archive and keep”, and on the power that archives have to “represent and interpret history and the place of man in it”. Two large-scale installations will be shown next to a series of drawings, notes and unpublished documents by Paul Otlet, the Belgian man dubbed the “father of documentation”, selected by the artist.
