Tacita Dean artwork unveiled at Tate Modern's Turbine Hall
Thursday, 13 October 2011
University College Falmouth (UCF) alumna and British filmmaker Tacita Dean is the 12th artist to receive the career-defining Unilever commission, which has seen her transform the Tate Modern's vast Turbine Hall with a work of art: an 11-minute silent film projected onto a giant monolith. Entitled ‘FILM' the looped movie, which has the appearance of a filmstrip with sprocket holes visible on each side, stands some 13 metres tall and features flickering images of snails, clocks, fountains, and giant bubbles. Last year Chinese artist Ai Weiwei filled the cavernous space with millions of porcelain "sunflower seeds".
Dean made the work using in-camera and studio techniques, such as double exposure and glass-matte painting, that hark back to the early days of cinema. It is typical of her film works, for which she is well-known, obeying a distinctive aesthetic in line with the tradition of the hand-held-camera style of early 20th century 16mm pictures. They characteristically take the form of highly personal portraits of figures she admires, poetic and open-ended documentaries, or painterly mediations on light. FILM, which will be on show until 9 April 2012, is lovingly crafted and features various pieces of footage pieced together. Dean commented, "The heart of my process is the editing. It's almost as if I court chaos in the filming because I know I have this period later when it will just be me and it."
In recent months, Dean has voiced concern about the declining availability of film as a digital technology becomes the norm and photochemical labs close down. "I suddenly realised we are just about to lose this really beautiful medium we created 125 years ago," Dean said. But she said she was not against digital film-making. "Digital is also a fantastic medium. It's got massive potential but I love film and I don't want to lose my ability to make film and it looks like I probably will."
Dean was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1998 and in 1999 Tate exhibited her work, ‘Bubble House', the subject of which was a modernist home in ruins. The building was an abandoned half-built egg-shaped house on Cayman Brac in the Cayman Islands. Her previous film pieces have included the effect of the 1999 solar eclipse on a farm in Cornwall. For 2009's Craneway Event, she filmed choreographer Merce Cunningham rehearsing his company in an abandoned car factory overlooking San Francsico bay.
Born in Canterbury in 1965, Dean initially studied at UCF in 1985 when it was Falmouth School of Art. After a scholarship year in Athens, she attended the Slade School of Fine Art in London. She now lives and works in Berlin.
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