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Fiona Tan’s international career took off when Okwui Enwezor presented her at Documenta 11 as an artist capable of handling identity and background in a form that is both political and poetic. This summer, her exhibition at the Dutch pavilion in Venice, entitled Disorient, may well prove Enwezor right.Fiona Tan was born in 1966, in Indonesia, of Chinese and Australian parents. She now lives in Amsterdam. The fact that she is of mixed heritage is mentioned in virtually every text that is written about her. This is no surprise, because in all her work, as a self-declared ‘professional foreigner’, she investigates the phenomenon of being different. In Facing Forward (1999), the work with which she participated in the main exhibition at the 2001 Venice Biennial, she used archival footage from anthropological and ethnographic films made about the Papuans and succeeded in reversing the point of view and having those portrayed look at us instead. In Provenance, a work created for the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum, which will also be presented in Venice, she directs the eye to the unseen and un-described, or perhaps forgotten, history of the collection of the Rijksmuseum and Amsterdam. By looking at anonymous portraits by lesser-known masters, Tan created a new (subjective) history of the city in which she lives. The portraits of the people of Amsterdam show how fragile and personally coloured our memories are, not only in the context of history, but also our own pasts. It is a subject that Tan also investigated in Rise & Fall, one of the new works she has made for the Dutch pavilion. The title work of Tan’s presentation in Venice, Disorient, refers to the significance of thirteenth-century Venice as a doorway to the East, and its most famous inhabitant, Marco Polo. Polo’s historic hero status is closely bound to his visit to the court of the Kublai Khan, the greatest of the Mongolian rulers at the time, but as Tan explains, ‘Today, there is almost no one who has read Marco Polo’s book Il Milione. When I read it, I noticed things that are nowhere to be found in the contemporary image that has been created around the personality of Marco Polo. Il Milione not only describes his stay at the Mongolian court, but also his travels to the Far East. The book is a merchant’s guide: dull and boring, in which Polo only has eyes for what can be bought.’Tan connects the trading power of 13th-century Venice with the Orientalism of Edward Saïd, and the inability of the ‘West’ to place itself in the identity of the ‘East’. Marco Polo’s travel report is thus translated into our own age. She refers not only to the centuries-old, one-sided image of the East on the part of the West, but also indicates that the West has become ‘disorientated’. With globalization, western dominance – colonial, economic and intellectual – and the worldview associated with it have both come under fire. As a result, the Western perception of the Orient has been dismantled, together with its position in the world.With Disorient, Tan moves through time, place and memory, at once dialectically and intuitively. On a personal level, she interweaves her own position as a ‘professional foreigner’ with that of Marco Polo as the perpetual outsider, at home neither in the Orient nor in the city where he was born. The Venice Biennial is itself also referred to in the work. The collection of Oriental-seeming objects that pass us by in Disorient refers to the wealth enjoyed by 13th-century Venice as a port of transit for goods from the Far East. Equally, however, it refers to the Western concept of culture as an object of trade: the Venice Biennial as a place full of displaced ideas and objects.Erik van Tuijn