Tacita Dean
born 1965, Canterbury, England
lives in Berlin and Los Angeles
During the opening days of Oh, Gods of Dust and Rainbows, Tacita Dean’s One Hundred and Fifty Years of Painting enjoyed an exceptional Cleveland premiere. This film, usually presented as a continuous loop, follows a conversation between two painters who share a birthday fifty years apart: the late Luchita Hurtado and Julie Mehretu, who is also featured in FRONT 2022 and is developing a public mural for downtown Cleveland that will be on view for ten years. Filmed in Santa Monica, California, on January 3, 2020, the two discuss the serendipitous over laps of their creative practices and lives, with musings on painting, motherhood, ecology, and more. As in many of Dean’s iconic filmic portraits, the conversation offers viewers the experience of a slowly unfolding artistic dialogue. Within the context of the presentation at CIA Cinematheque, the work suggests how the small-scale dialogue of two people can nevertheless encompass the entire world. Each of the films shown at CIA Cinematheque (by Dean, Leigh Ledare, and Asad Raza) explores conversations—between both human and more-than-human worlds—at growing scales:the dyad, the group, and, lastly, at the planetary level.
Dean’s work in film and other media suggests both intimacy and sweeping grandeur. In its scope and approach, her art embodies a measured, drawn-out experience of time passing—something that informs the entirety of the triennial’s slow approach to exhibition making.