Darren Tanny Tan 'AFTERIMAGE'

14 November – 7 December 2025

Featuring a new series of photographic reworkings constructed from fragments of sourced historical imagery

Afterimage extends Darren Tanny Tan’s ongoing engagement with the unstable legacies of photographic history. The exhibition presents a new series of works that sustains his exploration of erasure, destruction, and re-inscription as modes of image-making. Each piece begins as a digitally constructed mise-en-scène, assembled from fragments of sourced imagery of historical conflict, before undergoing a tactile choreography of damage and transformation. Through an expedient misuse of photographic chemicals and deliberate mark-making, the images are reworked into little more than impressions of clouds and ruins, imprinted with fractures, stains, and residue.

Tanny Tan’s practice is driven by what he terms the "ontological insufficiency of the photographic image" — its inability to fully represent reality or memory despite the illusion of fixity. His obfuscated images allude to the fragility of collective memory and the ways history is continually obscured and remade. Within this tension, destruction and preservation become entwined gestures, mirroring the instability of memory itself, where every attempt to recall the past is always already contaminated by forces that undo it.

Artist Bio

Darren Tanny Tan is a Singapore-born artist based in Melbourne/Naarm whose practice pushes against the limits of photography as both medium and metaphor. At once examining and betraying notions of the image and history, he interrogates how visual records are constructed, fractured, and rewritten. His approach is defined by experimental and deliberately disruptive processes—chemical interventions, physical abrasion, and digital manipulation—that rupture, obscure, and reconfigure the photographic surface, revealing the instability of representation.

Tanny Tan’s work has been exhibited widely, including presentations at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Lindberg Galleries, and Stockroom Kyneton. He has been shortlisted for major photographic awards, among them multiple editions of the Bowness Photography Prize, the Olive Cotton Award, the Nillumbik Prize, and the Mullins Contemporary Photography Prize. He holds a Bachelor of Photography from Photography Studies College and a Master of Contemporary Art from the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA).