archivetacitadean

Tacita Dean, Michael Hamburger, 2007, Collectie De Michael Hamburger 2007, Collectie De Pont

Tacita Dean's Portrait of a Poet and Survivor in His Apple Orchard

Tacita Dean, Still Life, 2009.

Tacita Dean, Michael Hamburger, 2007, Collectie De Pont.

De Pont Museum of Contemporary Art
Wilhelminapark 1
Tilburg
+31 (0)13 - 5438300
Project Space
Tacita Dean
Michael Hamburger
November 27, 2010-January 23, 2011

Commissioned to make a work in relation to the writer, W. G. Sebald, Tacita Dean took as her subject the poet and translator Michael Hamburger whom Sebald meets in a chapter of his book, The Rings of Saturn. Her 28 minute film, Michael Hamburger (2007), acquired by De Pont in 2009, concentrates on Hamburger’s love of apples, and on the orchard he grew himself in his Suffolk garden, mostly from the pips of apples he either found or had been given. The rambling house and its encroaching garden, the sunlight, the rattling wind and then the appearance of a rainbow all act as metaphor to the man as poet.

“Although Hamburger is said to have despaired of reviews of his poetry which declared that he was 'better known as a translator,' we might detect a similar deprecation of his self, by himself, in the film which shares his name. Unwilling, perhaps unable, to talk of his past and his migrations, most especially fleeing Nazism in 1933, he talks poignantly, instead, of his apple trees, of where they have come from, and of their careful cross-breeding. Purity is dismissed, and one senses with an awkward pathos that the poet is translating himself."

— Jeremy Millar in Waterlog, Castle Museum, Norwich.

Tacita Dean (born 1965, Canterbury, England) was educated at Kent College, Canterbury. Her brother is Ptolemy Dean, the architect. She studied at Falmouth School of Art, graduating in 1988. From 1990-2, Dean studied for a Masters degree at the Slade School of Fine Art. Dean had her first solo exhibition The Martyrdom of St Agatha and Other Stories, at Galerija Skuc, Maribor, Slovenia.

In 1995, she was included in General Release: Young British Artists at the XLVI Venice Biennale. She was one of the "key names",along with Jake and Dinos Chapman, Gary Hume, Sam Taylor-Wood, Fiona Banner and Douglas Gordon, of the Young British Artists (YBAs). Her work though had little in common with prominent YBAs, Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin.

Following her 1996 film Disappearance at Sea was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1998. In 2001 she was given a solo show at Tate Britain. In 2000 Dean was awarded a one-year German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) scholarship to Berlin, where she moved that year. She devoted attention to the architecture and cultural history of Germany. She has made films of such iconic structure as the Berliner Fernsehturm and the Palast der Republik. Other projects have concerned important figures in post-war German cultural history, such as W.G. Sebald and Joseph Beuys. She continues to live and work in Berlin.

2006 saw the most comprehensive retrospective of her work to date, Analogue, at Schaulager Basel. In 2006, Tacita Dean won the Hugo Boss Prize.

In 2009 the Nicola Trussardi Foundation presented Still Life, Tacita Dean’s first major solo exhibition in Italy, on the first floor (piano nobile) of Palazzo Dugnani, a historic building in the centre of Milan. The exhibition presented a selection of 14 works, including the world premiere of two films commissioned and produced by the Nicola Trussardi Foundation: Still Life and Day for Night, filmed in the Bolognese studio of painter Giorgio Morandi.

Dean has undertaken commissions for London's defunct Millennium Dome, the Sadler's Wells Theatre, and for Cork, Ireland, as part of that city's European City of Culture celebrations. She has also completed residencies at the Sundance Institute, the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, U.S., and the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, Berlin.

She lives and works in Berlin.

Tacita Dean, Michael Hamburger, 2007, Collectie De Pont.

Tacita Dean, Merce Cunningham performs STILLNESS (in three movements) to John Cage’s composition 4’33” with Trevor Carlson, New York City, 28 April 2007, (six performances; six films), 2008, Installation view at Dia: Beacon, Beacon, NY, Courtesy the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris, and Frith Street Gallery, London.

Documenting Merce Cunningham's Choreography of Cage's 4'33"

Musée d'Art
Contemporain de Montréal
185, Sainte-Catherine Ouest
514 847-6226
Montréal
Tacita Dean
October 10, 2009-
January 3, 2010

How to choreograph silence. That was the challenge issued by artist Tacita Dean to the great American choreographer Merce Cunningham, who revolutionized modern dance.

In 2007, British artist Tacita Dean invited Cunningham to choreograph John Cage’s composition 4’33’’. That piece — a 4-minute, 33-second silence “performed” in three movements — was highly influential in twentieth-century music and very emotional for the choreographer: Cage, who died in 1992, was his long-time collaborator and life partner. Cunningham, who was 88 at the time and in a wheelchair, accepted the challenge. On the afternoon of April 28, 2007, in the New York studios of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Dean filmed a total of six takes. Seated on a chair, before a wall of rehearsal-room mirrors, Cunningham performed silence by remaining immobile, adjusting his pose slightly between each of the movements in response to a signal from Trevor Carlson, the company’s director.

The show consists of an installation of six projections on screens arranged around the exhibition space, entitled Merce Cunningham performs STILLNESS (in three movements) to John Cage’s composition 4’33’’ with Trevor Carlson, New York City, 28 April 2007. Each projection corresponds to one of the six performances presented by Cunningham and filmed by Dean. With 4’33’’, Cage set out to compose a piece made of unbroken silence. In Stillness, Cunningham transposes this silence into immobility and Dean uses a still camera, shooting each performance from a different angle. The screens’ dimensions are calibrated so that the choreographer, whether seen in close-up or long shot, is life-size. Here, music, dance and film simultaneously share a common space-time with the visitor.

Born in 1965, in Canterbury, England, Tacita Dean explores various media, including drawing, photography and sound, but made her name internationally with her films documenting the passage of time. She has taken part in many solo and group exhibitions since 1992, at Dia:Beacon (2008), Solomon Guggenheim Museum, New York (2007), Schaulager, Munchenstein/Basel, Switzerland (2006), National Gallery of Contemporary Art, Oslo, Norway (2006), Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris (2003) and Tate Britain (2001), among others. Closer to us here, she participated in the 2000 Biennale de Montréal. She has won the Kurt Schwitters Prize (Germany, 2009) and the Hugo Boss Prize (United States, 2006), and was nominated for the Millennium Prize awarded by the National Gallery of Canada in 2001 and for the 1998 Turner Prize. Tacita Dean lives and works in Berlin.

The presentation at the Musée d’art contemporain is the artist’s first solo exhibition in Canada.

This work examining silence and the passage of time takes on added poignancy with the death of Merce Cunningham this past July.

The exhibition Tacita Dean was curated by Mark Lanctôt, curator at the Musée.