Continuing her recent collection of film portraits, Tacita Dean’s Michael Hamburger is a moving portrayal of the poet and translator, a resident of Middleton in Suffolk and great friend of W.G. Sebald.
The life and work of enigmatic Dutch/Californian conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader, who in 1975 disappeared under mysterious circumstances at sea in the smallest boat ever to cross the Atlantic. As seen through the eyes of fellow emigrant filmmaker René Daalder, the picture becomes a sweeping...
Dean filmed huge concrete, curved structures built in Dungeness in the UK, which date back to the 1920s. They were constructed as a pre-radar sound tracking system, where the curved concrete structures gathered sound which were listened to by people with a sort of stethoscope, the aim of which was...
Disappearance at Sea (1996) is a 16 mm colour film with sound shot on location at the lighthouse on St Abb’s Head in Berwick-upon-Tweed in northern England.
While documenting the decayed hull of the Teignmouth Electron, my companion and I drove up the other road on the hurricane coast of the small island and came across the Bubble House. Deserted and half-complete, it was built by a Frenchman who, according to the people of the island, embezzled money...
In the centre of the gallery is a pavilion housing the 35mm film Paradise (2021), the final work of the trilogy. It is the first time that Paradise is being shown as an artwork outside of its staging in the ballet. The soundtrack is a digital simulation of Thomas Adès’s orchestrated score...
Noir et Blanc, a 16 mm black-and-white film also presented at the Guggenheim, literalizes this sense of reaching an endpoint: The four-and-a-half-minute, fully abstract variation on Kodak’s theme was created using the few remaining rolls of double-sprocketed black-and-white film the artist could...
Recently, working on another project in Utah, Tacita Dean noticed that land in the distance was changing shape — as were the trucks moving along a distant highway. Using the little 16mm film she had in hand, she managed to film the elusive fata morgana.
Banewl was filmed entirely within the two hour and forty minute period of the total eclipse of the sun on 11 August 1999, and takes its title from a phonetic transcription of the Cornish pronunciation of the dairy farm’s name, ‘Burnewhall’. Because the day was overcast, the film became less...
'Mario Merz' was made in San Gimignano in Tuscany, Italy where Dean was invited to a residency in summer 2002. Dean's film is a study of the ageing artist in the last year of his life. Merz is observed sitting in silence under a tree, a large pinecone in his hand. The film is ostensibly a portrait,...
"'Event for a Stage’ is a 16mm film I made in 2015 with the actor Stephen Dillane. I normally project the work as film inside galleries and museums, and occasionally cinemas. I have always been steadfast about showing my films in the medium with which they were made and were always intended to be...
