Fiona Tan Elsewhere, 2018 Presented by Frith Street, London and Peter Freeman, Inc., New York City Dystopias abound in current pop culture. Whether including zombies, natural catastrophes, or repressive theocracies, they have overtaken utopias as the most discussed - and sometimes probable - future prospects. In her work Elsewhere (2018), Dutch-Indonesian artist Fiona Tan interrogates the potential contradictions and intersections between these two speculative approaches. Inspired by classics of utopian literature such as Tommaso Campanella’s The City of the Sun (1623), Tan has written her own concept of this age-old idea, combining it with a Los Angeles panorama characterized by the city’s most unpleasant aspects: traffic and pollution. This gesture is, however, not motivated by irony or sarcasm; it rather seeks to interrogate the ambiguous qualities of utopian thought, chiefly its lack of consideration for reality and human nature. Elsewhere will be presented in Basel by London’s Frith Street Gallery and New York City’s Peter Freeman, Inc.
