Tacita Dean

At age 45, Tacita Dean is widely recognized as one of the most important contemporary artists. A Brit based in Berlin since 2000, she has twice participated in the Venice Biennale, had numerous solo exhibitions and several museum retrospectives dedicated to her, and is currently preparing for her Turbine Hall commission at Tate Modern. The independent film scene and film criticism, however, have taken little notice of Dean so far – although a main focus of her art has been her fascinating practice with 16mm film. Stan Douglas and Matthew Buckingham are two other examples of this tendency in film culture to place "artist-filmmakers" outside the realm of cinema – just as, conversely, the art establishment with its rather selective film foibles likes to obscure the rich traditions of avant-garde cinema. 

 

This is all the more reason that the Austrian Film Museum is thrilled to have the rare opportunity to present two evenings with works by the filmmaker Tacita Dean. In conjunction with The Line of Fate, her brilliant exhibition of drawings, photogravures and new film installations at Vienna’s MUMOK museum (on show until May 29), the two Film Museum presentations will give an overview of her earlier films. Tacita Dean will attend both shows and speak about her work with MUMOK curator Achim Hochdörfer and the Film Museum’s director Alexander Horwath.

 

In the preface to the publication on Dean's retrospective Analogue in 2006, she wrote: "Analogue is a description of all things I hold dear." In her work with moving images, this has led to a strong preference for 16mm film, the primary medium of independent and experimental film after 1945. Given the fact that today's motion picture mainstream (in entertainment as well as in art museums) operates on a digital basis, this seemingly old-fashioned choice of material can be read as an expression of a critical or utopian understanding of history: "Dean brings back the unseen, and makes the visible new again." (Peter Bürger) Time and again she deals with precarious, endangered, seemingly “extra-terrestrial” buildings and spaces (i.e., Bubble House, 1999; Fernsehturm, 2001) and portrays elderly artists whose "legendary" status is also connected to marginality, reclusiveness, and unavailability (i.e., Michael Hamburger, 2007). In one of her finest works – Kodak, 2006 – she travels to the source of her own artistic material which is threatened by economic changes: the Kodak factory in Chalon-sur-Saône which produces raw film stock.

 

Critic James Quandt has described Tacita Dean not only as a "recalcitrant materialist," but also as an “English romantic, an aesthetic descendant of Turner, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Michael Powell.” The mysterious beauty that flows through Dean's films is due in part to her preference for volatile subjects in constant motion such as light and air, sea and sky (A Bag of Air, 1995; Disappearance at Sea, 1996). The references to lighthouses and sailors imply a narrative energy, something playful and "wonder-full," which, in Dean's films, never quite (except in The Martyrdom of St. Agatha, 1994) fully breaks loose – but which instead is always waiting to be summoned: on the edge of the frame, at the line where screen and mask, the seen and the unseen, and nature and history come in contact with each other.