Fiona Tan: Shadow Archive

In the late 19th century, two young Belgian jurists – Paul Otlet (1868–1944), the father of documentation, and Henri La Fontaine (1854–1943), a Nobel Peace Prize laureate – conceived of a project that sought to gather the world’s knowledge and file it using the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) system that they had created.

The resulting institution, the Mundaneum, became, in the 20th century, a universal centre of documentation. Today, its collections are made up of thousands of books, newspapers, journals, documents, posters, glass plates and postcards – millions of thematic index cards that have withstood the tests of time and war. Inspired by this massive collection that is sometimes referred to as the Paper Google, internationally acclaimed artist Fiona Tan recently unveiled an ambitious and poetic project for the Musée des Arts Contemporains (MAC) in Grand-Hornu, Belgium, that is centred on memory and narrative, and straddles fiction and reality with ease. In the monographic exhibition, titled Shadow Archive, Tan reveals the results of two years of research that she conducted at the Mundaneum.