Tacita Dean

Since the beginning of the 1990s, Tacita Dean has been travelling throughout the world on a quest for singular images and sounds that make up the material for her work. The British artist uses different media - photography, installation and drawing - but particularly favours 16mm film. This exhibition presents her most recent works, including two new films : Boots (three versions) and Pie.

Tacita Dean is drawn to the stories of extraordinary characters (Boots), to the inscription of the past on abandoned objects or places (Section Cinema), and to the almost immaterial transience of natural phenomena like solar eclipses (Diamond Ring) or the green ray (The Green Ray). While she takes off from an approach related to the documentary, she remains open to coincidences and lets chance inflect her creative process. By sharing her own experiences with the spectator in a perceptible way, she calls up a memory that is as personal as it is collective.

The cyclical nature of time and processes of disappearance and appearance are central themes of her work. Nature - the sea and the sky in Chère petite soeur and the observation of animal and bird behaviour, for example in Pie - acts as a metaphor for change as well as for permanence. 

This impression of timelessness is reinforced by the intrusion of fiction into the real. Whereas "Boots" animates the empty Casa Serralves in Porto through his recollection of imaginary memories, vintage post-cards of Washington Cathedral serve as fictitious souvenirs of a building that did not exist at the time they were printed.

Through the use of fixed shots and filming in real time, Tacita Dean suspends and renders time palpable. By distilling past, present and future into a unique temporality, she combines the duration of the work with the time of the spectator, providing them with a particularly poetic sensorial experience. 

An exhibition catalogue as an artist book will gather together numerous texts by Tacita Dean closely linked to the films, as well as her complete filmography and contributions by Laurence Bossé, Julia Garimorth, Rita Kersting, Jean-Luc Nancy and Michael Newman.  Pressetext

Tacita Dean
Kuratorinnen: Julia Garimorth, Anne Dressen