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Published in The New Yorker, October, 2011
The enormous projection screen, known as the Monolith, was placed directly in front of the east wall, and when the Turbine Hall grid appeared on screen, it was as if the wall itself with pulsing with life. Triangles, circles, a grasshopper, red berries, a pink flower, a toe, Mount Analogue, a flickering light bulb—images succeeded one another on the grid, in richly colored syncopation. “FILM” was spectacular but not imposing, its silent procession of images odd and intimate.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/10/31/111031fa_fact_eakin
Published in The Telegraph, October, 2011
If film is a medium that seemingly lacks a physical presence or substance, and is instead one which flickers and fades phantasmagorically before us and then persists largely in the memory, then this immateriality is echoed in Dean’s films, capturing that which is fugitive or fleeting – light changing, places or people before they vanish, time passing.
Published in The Guardian, October, 2011
Tacita Dean is a very English artist, I thought as I watched black and white waves, a sea of mist, and a fountain flicker in and out of her superb film in the Tate Turbine Hall. The atmosphere of film, as stuff, as celluloid, that it creates made me think of classic English films like Night Mail or Fires Were Started. Also, of the first work I ever saw by Dean.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2011/oct/19/tacita-dean-art-english
Published in The Arts Desk, October, 2011
Some images, such as a fountain, tree or sunlight filtering through leaves, fill the entire screen and, since the film is silent, such moments assume an almost religious intensity. Tate Modern has often been referred to as a cathedral of culture and, in this context, the east window assumes the significance of the east window of an actual cathedral; in some shots, a cathedral window even replaces parts of the industrial structure.
http://www.theartsdesk.com/visual-arts/tacita-dean-film-tate-modern
Published in BBC News, October, 2011
The artist is using the opportunity of being asked to fill this very public platform to raise awareness of what she says is the imminent demise of film; as a medium for making and presenting.
Published in The Guardian, October, 2011
The Turbine Hall is both set and cinema, a real place and a place of illusions in Dean’s Unilever commission. The more I think about it, the richer and more complex it gets. We are projectors too, life clattering through our brains. Film looks totally new and oddly out of time, with its cutaway images, hand-painted mountains, rivers of lightning like pulsing nerves, beautiful rocking reflections of leaves in water, sunsets glancing through foliage. Dean’s eye, and that of her young son Rufus, peer out as though through keyholes cut in the layered image.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/oct/10/tacita-dean-film-review
Published in Art Monthly , October 2010
The ‘Craneway Event’ of Dean’s film took place on the West Coast, in a magnificent Albert Kahn building from the 1930s. A ford assembly plant until 1955, it overlooks San Francisco bay, with three sides of the building glazed in order to maximise the light. Dean filmed the rehearsals over three days, including all initial preparations up to the final dress rehearsal. This raised various important questions for the film project: the absence of music (as in most Cunningham productions, the music is rehearsed separately from the dance, sharing only a broad, overall time structure), though not sound; and the issue of the edit - that is, how to condense the span of the rehearsals into smaller time period without being either conventional or overly ‘arty’ ( in fact admirably realised by Dean)
Related Exhibitions: Tacita Dean: Craneway Event
Published in ARTFORUM, September 2010
In Craneway Event, an art practice that combines in an unprecedented way moving and still images to capture a late-modernist culture on the brink of disappearing. In today’s culture, unable to preserve the relics-both mortal and architectural-of the last century, Dean’s film offers another means of reclaiming and displaying overlapping moments of our recent past.
Related Exhibitions: Tacita Dean: Craneway Event
Published in Sight & Sound, June 2010
Dean has a habit of chopping her wide screen into discrete-and a fearless willingness to let nothing happen in some of those segments for minutes on end. It’s a technique that pays off in some heart-stopping scenes: the sudden appearance of an exhausted dancer in the space beside a close-up Cunningham; the ponderous looming into shot of a huge ship in the harbour: the almost prissy movement of a thin mast behind the robust bodies of the dancers.
Related Exhibitions: Tacita Dean: Craneway Event
Published in The Daily Telegraph, May 2010
In November 2008, she recorded three days of rehearsals for one of his “events” – selections from his works specially staged. But he died the following year, aged 90, before her film was finished. That turns an artistic record of one of the most important figures in contemporary dance into something more: an elegy, an epitaph, a memorial to the genius of creation. It is 110 minutes long, shown at specific times, and though you can wander in and out, it is so magical that you won’t want to.
Related Exhibitions: Tacita Dean: Craneway Event
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