[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”3778″ img_size=”full”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_empty_space height=”50px”][vc_column_text]Tacita Dean

FILM

Turbine Hall

Tate Modern

photos: nathalie hambro

Film is time made manisfest: time as physical length – 24 frames per second, 16 frames in a 35mm foot. It is still images beguiled into movement by movement and is eternally magical. The time in  my films is the time of the film itself. I cut my films on a Steenbeck cutting table. I always work alone. I physically splice the print and stick it together with tape. It is these days and weeks of solitary and concentrated labour which are at the heart of my creative process, and how I mould and make the films. Film is my working material and I need the stuff of film like a painter needs the stuff to paint.

FILM is a visual poem. I found its rhythm and metre from the material itself, relying not only on the images I had, but on what is normally considered waste: the picture fading and the tail end of the roll, the shimmering metamorphosis of a colour filter change and the flash frames of over-exposure as the camera stops and starts. FILM is about film, and in the end, I let the material’s intrinsic magic be my guide.

Tacita Dean

Described by Tate Modern director Chris Dercon as “an homage to analogue film-making”, the film is projected onto a 13-metre screen at the eastern end of a darkened turbine hall. Filmed in portrait format rather than the conventional landscape, the Berlin-based British-born artist says that the piece is “a portrait of the medium itself”. Dean is worried that traditional film printing faces extinction, with the number of laboratories in Europe capable of processing 25mm analogue film down to single figures. “Digital is a separate medium. It’s also a fantastic medium; it’s got massive potential,” she told a press conference. “I am in no way anti-digital; I want to make that completely clear. But I love film and I don’t want to lose my ability to make film. It looks like I probably will.” Entitled FILM, the footage was shot in Berlin even though the piece is set in the turbine hall itself. The artist explains that it “quotes” Olafur Eliasson’s earlier Weather Project installation for the turbine hall, “just because I could”. (The two artists shared a studio in Berlin.) Asked to explain why she had made a silent film, the artist said that the main reason was a lack of budget for sound, but she added that she was conscious that “the turbine hall has its own soundtrack”.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_empty_space height=”50px”][vc_single_image image=”3779″ img_size=”full”][vc_empty_space height=”50px”][vc_single_image image=”3780″ img_size=”full”][vc_empty_space height=”50px”][vc_single_image image=”3781″ img_size=”full”][vc_empty_space height=”50px”][vc_single_image image=”3782″ img_size=”full”][vc_empty_space height=”50px”][vc_single_image image=”3783″ img_size=”full”][vc_empty_space height=”50px”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text css_animation=”none” el_class=”with-link”]    back to ART DIARY[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]