Fiona Tan’s Provenance (2008): Inhabiting the World as a ‘Professional Foreigner’

Abstract

This paper considers Fiona Tan’s 2008 work Provenance—six filmic portraits of ordinary residents in Amsterdam of diverse professional and ethnic backgrounds, which probes into the notion of provenance in an unprecedentedly multicultural and multiethnic globalizing circumstance. The work forges interesting dialogues with Tan’s own experience of transnational inhabitation and cross-cultural exchanges. Tan was born in Indonesia to a Chinese Indonesian father and an Australian mother. In her early childhood, her family was forced to flee from Suharto’s military regime and relocate in Melbourne. Tan eventually made Amsterdam her home—the place where she works and resides. She often considers herself a ‘professional foreigner’ devoid of an unambiguous origin, which enables her to investigate multiple localities and cultures via physical research and actual experience unburdened by preconceived conventions. In Provenance, Tan brings to the fore a way of perceiving and apprehending one’s origins and histories built upon not established sociocultural and geopolitical narratives, but acquired knowledge through embodied engagement and identification with people’s quotidian activities in intimate surroundings of private homes from various positions and angles, which are also open to difference and change. This paper examines in what ways Tan’s work articulates an ethical position of being a professional foreigner permanently ‘in exile’, disrupting any consistent and coherent conception of provenance—when and where people or things originally came from; and how Tan’s filmic portraits render identity and home relational and transformative, constituted and reconstituted through, as feminist philosopher Allison Weir suggests, ‘relations of power’ and ‘relations of mutuality’.