Tacita Dean is a British artist now based in Berlin, best known for her use of film. Her work explores the temporal qualities of landscapes, as well as the celluloid medium itself. She uses time-based mediums to present fleeting narratives, or natural portraits, especially through still image and motion picture film photography. Her use of film is not for the sake of nostalgia, but more-so a utilization for a dying medium with qualities that are only apparent in a film-shot presentation. Her film pieces rely on the fact that they were shot and projected on film.

“Obsolescence is about time in the way film is about time: historical time; allegorical time; analogue time.” –Tacita Dean

Her film The Green Ray (2001) is a documentation of a sun setting, titled based on the sliver green line apparent for less than a second as the sun dips under the horizon line. The human eye can barely register it, and most digital cameras of the time period were not able to capture it.

From Tate on Youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lefvPUYGvi0

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ZHAZCKqW6f3wUx8D1hfl0dpyMaeAST-m?usp=sharing

Her work entitled ‘FILM’, is a silent 35mm looped film projected onto a monolith standing 13 metres tall in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. The work evokes the monumental mysterious black monolith from the classic science fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey. The film feels like a surreal visual poem, including images from the natural world among others, with the epic wall of the Turbine Hall showing through, in a montage of black and white, colour, and hand-tinted film.

Many of Dean’s works show the ways in which architecture can be transformed by the camera’s lens. Craneway Event 2009 follows the choreographer Merce Cunningham (1919–2009) and his dance company rehearsing in a former Ford assembly plant, built of glass and steel and overlooking the San Francisco Bay. Dean’s film allows the ever-changing light of this environment to fall in rhythm with the dancers’ movements.

FILM 2011 Tacita Dean born 1965 Purchased with assistance from Tate Members 2014 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T14273