Shades of blue, black and white are immersing the visitors into the new exhibition of Tacita Dean, at the Gegenwart
Her life, Venice and studies
The Kunstmuseum Basel present the incredible and immersive work of the British artist Tacita Dean and her explorations on films and drawings for the 2018 film Antigone.
Tacita Dean is born in the UK in 1965 in Canterbury, Kent. She’s coming from a family of well-known architect and craft maker, her father is Ptolemy Dean and her grandfather the founder of the Ealing Studio.
During her childhood, she studied at the Kent College of Canterbury before turning herself to the Falmouth University, where she graduated in 1988. After a two-year break, she started a master’s degree at the Slade School of Fine Art in London.
3 years after the end of her studies, she was featured in the exhibition “General Release: Young British Artists” presented at the Venice Biennale of 1995.
After this incredible event, she decided to move to London and get an art studio. Therefore, she immediately started to work on her first major exhibition at the Tate Britain: Tacita Dean: Recent films and Other Works, exhibition in 2001.
Nonetheless, her career reaches a point in 2014, when Dean was invited for a residence at the Getty Research Institute.
Since then, she’s been shown in major institution, galleries, and museum around the globe.
Antigone, treasure and creativity
For making her big debut in the Swiss art scene, the Kunstmuseum Basel present a serie of works relating to the 2018 film: Antigone.
While the idea for her film started out as in 1997, she wanted to write a play (and not a film) for the Sundance Screenwriting Lab. But the story took two decades, a camera, multiple friends and a lot of money and exploration.
Therefore, the entire film is filmed with a 35mm film camera with Dean’s own technique of “Aperture gate masking”. With this means, she's able to film multiples images in the same sensor, one at the top and one at the bottom.
With this mean, she needed to finish the film, to print it and then, to cut out the two parts of the film. While it’s easier to do on an analogue camera, I can’t imagine how long it took to have a one-hour-long film.
During her experimentation, the film camera helped her to be even more experimental with the technique and the subject she filmed.
Speaking of subject, the name “Antigone” resonate with Dean’s childhood and Greek fantasy. First, due to her family, her oldest sister is name Antigone, but the second reason date back to the Greek tragedy of Sophocles.
With this connection, Antigone came back as an eponymous heroine of the Theban trilogy of plays by Sophocles created in 441 BC. While studying this play, Dean’s invention picks up on the undramatised passage of time between “Oedipus Rex” and “Oedipus at Colonus” when a blinded king named King Oedipus was led by his daughter Antigone.
This relation between Greek and her work is shown with the two-sided projection of her film, reflection on the two eyes of the watcher.
There’s also the blindest of Dean’s work. While she was filming in multiple locations around the globe, she can’t really see the final work before it was developed, 9 months after the first shoot.
During these 9 months, the artist reflects on her creativity, she doesn’t know when she will be able to have the best shot, or if she will include it in the final film.
Therefore, she invited the Canadian in the early 200S the poet Anne Carson to write a text between the two Oedipus plays (that doesn’t exist anymore). But he replies that he already responded to her work with "TV Men: Antigone (Scripts 1 and 2)". The same goes with Peter Mayer (former CEO of Penguin Books) who help her during the writing phase of Antigone.
The show end with a series of chalk drawing and recent creation made by Dean during or for the film (owned by the Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation).
The most recent one is a large-scale blackboard drawing, Chalk Fall (2018) and a new Chalk drawing titled Cynthia Teeming, in reference to the full moon and the poem of Marvell’s poem: “Eyes and Tears”.
Finally, Tacita Dean show for the first time a hand-drawn lithographs called LA Magic Hour (2019-2021) produced with print publishers Gemini G.E.L.
PS: the screening time are: 11 and 12am, 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5pm.
Informations about the exhibition
Place: Kunstmuseum Basel | Gegenwart
Date: 28.8.2021 – 30.1.2022
Curators: Heidi Naef and Isabel Friedli
Ticket: Available on the website of the Kunstmuseum Basel OR at the front desk of the museum
Informations about the Kunstmuseum Basel
Kunstmuseum Basel
St. Alban-Graben 8
CH-4010 Basel
Phone: +41 61 206 62 62
Fax: +41 61 206 62 52
Mail: info@kunstmuseumbasel.ch