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  • Tacita Dean b1965
  • Palast 2004
  • 16mm colour film, audio track
  • Duration 10 min 30 sec
  • Presented by Tate Members 2006
  • Tate © Tacita Dean, courtesy Frith Street Gallery, London and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York / Paris
  • T12212
  • View work within Tate Collection
Tacita Dean, Palast

© The artist

Tacita Dean is best known for her compelling 16mm films. Palast demonstrates her continuing fascination with architectural relics that symbolise outmoded ideologies, becoming poignant and sometimes contentious repositories for collective memory. It documents the jaded façade of the Palast der Republik in Berlin, the former government building of the German Democratic Republic, which was scheduled for demolition when Dean filmed its disintegrating, reflective surfaces. The building had become an iconic focus for competing approaches to the transformation of Berlin, as a campaign to erase the building and all it stood for was countered by the view that it should be preserved in order to retain a sense of history. Dean's film eloquently evokes the poignancy of such a visible reminder of a painful past.

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