Tacita Dean Geography Biography

Best known for her contemplative films, often shot in a single sequence, Tacita Dean's work is a veritable praise of slowness. Moving away from films with commentary in the 1990s, she has since favored discreet soundtracks that further intensify the minimalism of her narratives. Her work has been the subject of retrospectives at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (Melbourne), Dia: Beacon (New York) and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York).

This artist's book was co-published by the Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, Éditions Dilecta and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia on the occasion of the exhibition Tacita Dean, Geography Biography at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris, from 24 May to September 11, 2023, and the Tacita Dean exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in Sydney, from December 8, 2023 to March 3, 2024.

The artist's atmospheric poetics are reflected in the curves of the architecture of the Bourse de Commerce. In particular, she will be presenting a new work, Geography Biography, of which this artist's book presents an archive. She invented a concave pavilion that fits into the concrete rotunda, an immaterial, almost lunar territory where light and reflections converge. Her Super 8 films are an autobiographical cartography of her travels around the world, embedded in postcards from her collection. The filmic hybridization of these nineteenth-century postcards and her early films shot in 35mm gives new life to distant temporalities, to the almost surreal fertilization of the imaginary, of life lived, captured and recorded on film, and of that which takes shape in the deepest contemplation of nature and art.