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Indepth Arts News:
"Tacita Dean"
2001-02-15 until 2001-05-06
Tate Britian
London, ,
UK United Kingdom
Tacita Dean is an artist internationally known for her compelling work in film. She has had major solo shows in the United States and Europe, but this will be her first significant exhibition in Britain. Coming at a mid-point in the artist's career, the exhibition will present a survey of Dean's work from the 1990s to the present. Several works will be on view in London for the first time, including an ambitious new film the artist is currently making in Berlin.
Tacita Dean trained as a painter and now works in a variety of media, including drawing, photography and sound, but is best known for her 16mm films, of which she has made seventeen to date. The specific qualities associated with film making are of central importance to her work. Long takes and static camera positions are characteristic of her films, creating a sense of stillness in their moving images. Despite this straightforwardness of style, the films remain enigmatic and mysterious in subject. They often feature water under different conditions but most commonly it appears in images of the coast where land meets the sea and sea mirrors the sky. Lighthouses appear in several works as either the central motif or as important details. Sited at points of greatest danger they send signals to guide and warn those at sea. The regularity of their circling lightbeams contrasts with the immeasurable expanse around them. In Dean's films such isolated human structures, enveloped by unfathomable natural immensity, are transformed to become metaphors for the human condition, silent witnesses to tragedy and loss, as much as to rescue and redemption.
Tacita Dean was born in 1965 in Canterbury, Kent. After graduating from Falmouth School of Art in 1988 she won a Greek Government Scholarship to the Supreme School of Fine Art, Athens in 1988-9. She has had many solo exhibitions, including; Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam (1997); ICA, Philadelphia, with US tour (1998); Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basle (2000) and forthcoming solo shows in Barcelona and Melbourne in 2001. She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions. In 1998 she was shortlisted for the Turner Prize. Tacita Dean is currently on a DAAD scholarship in Berlin.
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