Tacita Dean

(British, born 1965)

Tacita Dean is a British Conceptual artist known for her esoteric films. The artist explores both specific historical events and formal qualities of the 16 mm film, as seen in her Disappearance at Sea (1996) and The Green Ray (2001). Dean’s use of celluloid film, photography, installation, and drawing, seems an act of mourning for the analog world of documents and photographs as it passes into the realm of a massive digital archive. “A world that won't forget is a world drowned in its not forgetting,” she reflected. “Do we want a world full of unedited memory? To be human is to be finite.” Born in 1965 in Canterbury, United Kingdom, she studied at Falmouth University and received her MA from the Slade School of Fine Art in 1992. Influenced by a range of artists and writers, including Marcel Broodthaers, Robert Smithson, J.G. Ballard, and W.G. Sebald, Dean’s work is steeped in questions regarding cultural loss. In 2001, the artist published her book Floh which consisted of arranged photographs Dean found while scouring flea markets throughout Europe and America. She has gone on to participate in three Venice Biennales as well as documenta 13 in Kassel. The artist lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Today, Dean’s works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, the Reina Sofia National Museum in Madrid, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., among others.