Tacita Dean - The Turbine Hall, Tate Modern

The much anticipated (at least, by me - see below) installation by Tacita Dean for the Tate's series of commissions for the Turbine Hall, has been unveiled and will be on view until 11 March, 2012. The work, called 'Film' is shot on 35mm film stock and is described as a homage to a medium which is fast disappearing. Read Adrian Seare's review and see installation shots, below.

16mm film (Tacita Dean)

Tacita Dean, still from Kodak, 16mm colour film, 44mins, 2006 (Tate Collection)
I welcomed the announcement that Tacita Dean had been awarded the commission for the next Turbine Hall installation at Tate Modern (see below) – and wondered what she might do. An article by her, Save Celluloid, for Art's Sake, in the Guardian reveals that it will involve 16mm film. However, the point of the article is to lament the news that the last professional lab in the UK to print 16mm film has ceased to do so. Dean’s interesting article eloquently describes the skills and resources that will be lost as a consequence.

The news renders even more poignant, the current exhibition The Days of Darkrooms and Reel to Reel: ANALOG showing at Riflemaker until 5th March (see below).

Tacita Dean - Turbine Hall commission

I am very excited to learn that Tacita Dean, one of my favourite artists, has been given the daunting challenge of taking on the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall installation, next year (to be unveiled 11^th October, 2011).

Tacita Dean (photo: Frith Street Gallery)

Dean has worked in a variety of media – drawing, sound, found objects, photographs - but is, perhaps, best known for her 16mm films – Laura Cumming, reviewing Dean’s recent Craneway Event (a film of Merce Cunningham rehearsing his dancers in a disused Ford assembly plant in San Francisco) called her the great poet of art film.

Brian Dillon, writing in Tate Etc identifies Dean’s characteristic attraction to objects that speak of a future that never came: Such structures seem to bypass the present, setting up instead a strange relay between past and future, between utopia and nostalgia.

Dean’s poetic meditations include: Fernsehturm, the revolving restaurant at the top of Berlin’s television tower; Sound Mirrors: the spooky 1930s pre-radar, concrete listening devices in Kent; Bubble House, the abandoned futuristic house in the Cayman Islands - discovered by Dean when researching material for another work, Teignmouth Electron, the bizarre story of Donald Crowhurst, the hopelessly ill-prepared lone yachtsman who entered the 1969 round-the-world race, faked his logbooks and disappeared.

Tacita Dean: (top) still from Bubble House, 1999 (16mm colour film, 7 mins.); (bottom) still from Sound Mirrors, 1999 (16mm black and white film, 7 mins.)

Dean’s films are typically slow, and elegiac, the static camera’s gaze lingering on her subjects; it will be interesting to see what she does in the vast space of the Turbine Hall.

Tacita Dean is represented by Frith Street Gallery

Selected bibliography

Cumming, Laura (2001) "It's All Done with Sound Mirrors", The Observer, 4th March

Dean. Tacita (2005) Berlin Works, London: Tate St Ives

Dean, Tacita (1999) Teignmouth Electron, London: Book Works

Dean, Tacita and Millar, Jeremy (2005) Place, London: Thames & Hudson

Dillon, Brian (2005) "The History of Future Technology", Tate Etc, Issue 5, Autumn

Searle, Adrian (2001) "Age and Beauty", The Guardian, 20th February