Tacita Dean's work moves in the shadow of the world
About the "Tacita Dean - Geography Biography" exhibition at the Bourse de Commerce - Pinault Collection in Paris until 18 September.
Since her London debut thirty years ago, Tacita Dean has given film the mission of lighting up our nights. The British artist, who applied for German nationality after the Brexit and now lives between Berlin and Los Angeles, is occupying the rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce - Pinault Collection in Paris until 18 September with her 'Geography Biography'. By delving so deeply into her filmed memories, she felt compelled to appear in it herself, for the first time. "I didn't know how to forget this immense fresco which crowns the rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce and retraces the epic of France's colonialist trade in the 19th century and all the exploitation it engendered", the artist explained in an article in the French magazine Beaux Arts Magazine this summer. "As a Briton, I share this history with you, I can't ignore it. But the only answer I found was to make something very intimate. A film that moves in the shadow of the world."
The Bourse de Commerce - Pinault Collection has invited Tacita Dean to present an exhibition of previously unseen works of art, designed to coincide with the "Avant l'orage" season, which opens at the museum on 8 February. This is the first major exhibition of the artist's work in a French institution since the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 2003, where curator Julia Garimorth wrote: "It's as if, by taking an interest in erasure, the image was exposing itself to the danger of no longer containing anything". All the works on show today were produced specifically for the "Geography Biography" exhibition.
Tacita Dean is represented in the contemporary art world by the Marian Goodman art gallery in Paris and New York, and by the Frith Street Gallery in London. Born in 1965, Dean trained as a painter at the Slade School of Art in London, but soon turned to film and photography as her preferred mediums. Her works have regularly appeared on the contemporary art market through public auctions since 1997, mainly in the Photo section, and are most often sold in the United Kingdom.
"All the things that attract me are about to disappear," says Tacita Dean. "For Geography Biography, this great hunter worked from some of the postcards she had unearthed at flea markets and kept in her immense collection of images," explains Emmanuelle Lequeux in her brilliant article for Beaux Arts Magazine. "They represent an ancient griffin, an iris, a cave, an edelweiss, a glacier, a bunker, a waterfall, and are 'perforated' by the appearance within them of all sorts of moving images: scraps of the artist's films, which she set out to explore anew in order to compose this installation. There are traces of some of her 'hits', her green ray captured in Madagascar, the Fernsehturm in Berlin, which has served as a beacon for this Berliner for twenty years, or the super-eights of her childhood; and eclipses, relatives, friends".
Tacita Dean uses film and photography, as well as drawing and collage. In the midst of the Covid-19 epidemic, she travelled to Japan to 'meet' two of the country's oldest cherry trees. Moved by the cult that the Japanese pay to them and by their resilience, she drew two 'portraits' of these 'wise old trees', which she retouched in pencil. What really sets her work apart is the attention she pays to time, the invitation she extends to chance, with uncertainty as its corollary. To the dematerialisation of images and their frenetic consumption, the artist responds with slowness, with the work of the hand, reinvesting, with applied patience, the materiality of these media and the amplitude of their formats. Using chalk, paintbrushes, analogue film and silver photography, she invites us to experience the physicality of the work, playing with scale, between the monumental and the infinitesimal, the eternal and the ephemeral.
In Galerie 2, geological time intersects with the transience of a flowering: temporalities contrast to help us grasp the ineffable. An original drawing, The Wreck of Hope (2022), over seven metres long, reproduces a thousand-year-old glacier in chalk: the fragility of the material makes the fragility of this giant from the depths of time both delicately and radically perceptible. The photographs Sakura (Taki I) (2022) and Sakura (Jindai I) (2023) show sakuras, Japanese prunus, whose branches are propped up to support their ephemeral blooms, a symbol of the cyclical rebirth of life. By retouching these monuments with coloured pencil, the artist exposes both their venerability and their vulnerability. The artist shows these disappearing immortals with the strength and tension that no news image can contain.
In the orb of the Rotonde, after Danh Vo's forest in mutation, Tacita Dean inscribes a circular pavilion, drawing a circle within the circle, like an eclipse. Beneath the vast painted panorama that stretches out above visitors and depicts France's commercial and colonial expansion projects under the Third Republic, the artist inscribes a more personal geography. Geography Biography (2023), a 35mm film - produced for this exhibition at the Bourse de Commerce - presented by the artist in this darkened space, sketches out an autobiographical cartography: images filmed in various parts of the world are embedded in twentieth-century postcards from his collection, offering recomposed landscapes, bringing to life distant and dreamlike temporalities, fragments of the artist's life and memory. According to the artist, the 35mm film presented in the form of a diptych becomes "a very physical manifestation of time: twenty-four images per second. When you work with a physical material, you're dealing with physical time, not something hermetic or discontinuous".
"Ultimately, it is with the world and its flows that she is trying to bring us into harmony," as Emmanuelle Lequeux so aptly put it in her article for Beaux Arts Magazine.
Image: Tacita Dean, Sakura Study (Taki I), 2022