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Exhibition

The Unilever Series: Tacita Dean: FILM

11 October 2011 – 11 March 2012
Tacita Dean Unilever series banner

FILM is an 11-minute silent 35 mm film projected onto a gigantic white monolith standing 13 metres tall at the end of a darkened Turbine Hall. It is the first work in The Unilever Series devoted to the moving image, and celebrates the masterful techniques of analogue filmmaking as opposed to digital. The work evokes the monumental mysterious black monolith from the classic science fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey. The film feels like a surreal visual poem, including images from the natural world among others, with the epic wall of the Turbine Hall showing through, in a montage of black and white, colour, and hand-tinted film.

This film file is broken and is being removed. Sorry for any inconvenience this causes.

Tacita Dean: Film

Tacita Dean is a British artist now based in Berlin, best known for her use of film. Dean’s films act as portraits or depictions rather than conventional cinematic storytelling, capturing fleeting natural light or subtle shifts in movement. Her static camera positions and long takes allow events to unfold unhurriedly. Other works have attempted to reconstruct events from memory, such as an infamous thwarted attempt to circumnavigate the world.

Dean’s interest in the cinematic also extends to her work in other media. The Russian Ending 2001 borrows its title from the early Danish cinema tradition of making two alternate endings for a film: one happy for the American market and one tragic for the Russian market. In this work, Dean annotated postcards of catastrophes with director's notes.

Many of Dean’s works show the ways in which architecture can be transformed by the camera's lens. Craneway Event 2009 follows the choreographer Merce Cunningham (1919–2009) and his dance company rehearsing in a former Ford assembly plant, built of glass and steel and overlooking the San Francisco Bay. Dean’s film allows the ever-changing light of this environment to fall in rhythm with the dancers’ movements.

Dates

11 October 2011 – 11 March 2012

Sponsored by

The Unilever Series: an annual art commission

The Unilever Series: an annual art commission

Related events

Find out more

  • Tacita Dean Palast 2004 Film Stills on colour Photogravure

    The history of future technology

    Brian Dillon

    Tacita Dean explores the elastic nature of time and space, and is intrigued by futuristic-looking abandoned buildings that have been ‘left to leach their enigmatic energies into the surrounding territory.’ To coincide with her exhibition at Tate St. Ives, Brian Dillon examines her poetic view of history.

  • Tacita Dean, Foley Artist 1996 © Tate Photography

    Art Now: Tacita Dean: Foley Artist

    Now: Tacita Dean: Foley Artist: past Tate Britain exhibition

  •  
     

    Rosalind Krauss on Tacita Dean’s FILM

    Professor Rosalind E. Krauss discusses Tacita Dean’s work FILM 2011, in relation to her ongoing championing of medium specificity

  • Tacita Dean

    Tacita Dean: past Tate St Ives exhibition

  • Tacita Dean Fernsehturm 2001

    Tacita Dean: Recent Films and Other Works

    Tacita Dean: Recent Films and Other Works, Tate Britain

  • Artist

    Tacita Dean CBE

    born 1965
Artwork
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