Paradise

Paradise

2021 · 24 min

In the centre of the gallery is a pavilion housing the 35mm film Paradise (2021), the final work of the trilogy. It is the first time that Paradise is being shown as an artwork outside of its staging in the ballet. The soundtrack is a digital simulation of Thomas Adès’s orchestrated score Paradiso. Known technically as a MIDI, the computer simulation became an invaluable tool while the orchestra were unable to record the music during the Covid-19 lockdowns. Paradise was filmed in the extended format Cinemascope and is entirely abstract, drawing on the circular and planetary motifs present in Dante’s ‘Paradiso’. The film’s rich colours were taken from the palette of William Blake (b. 1757 – d. 1827, London) and can also be seen in the ten hand-printed silkscreen prints representing the planetary states in the corridor.

Directed by Tacita Dean

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Promises: Through Congress

Promises: Through Congress · 2021

Promises: Through Congress

Promises: Through Congress is a collaboration between Julie Mehretu, electronic music composer Floating Points aka Sam Shepherd, and filmmaker Trevor Tweeten. This 46-minute film features Mehretu’s expansive painting Congress (2003) and Promises (Luaka Bop, 2021), the acclaimed album from Floating Points and jazz titan Pharoah Sanders featuring the London Symphony Orchestra. Filmed on location at The Broad in Los Angeles.

Disappearance at Sea

Disappearance at Sea · 1996

Disappearance at Sea

MovieDocumentary

Disappearance at Sea (1996) is a 16 mm colour film with sound shot on location at the lighthouse on St Abb’s Head in Berwick-upon-Tweed in northern England.

Film

Tacita Dean took up the challenge of filling Tate Modern's Turbine Hall in 2011. Her response, entitled 'FILM', is a silent 35mm looped film projected onto a monolith standing 13 metres tall.

Mario Merz

Mario Merz · 2002

'Mario Merz' was made in San Gimignano in Tuscany, Italy where Dean was invited to a residency in summer 2002. Dean's film is a study of the ageing artist in the last year of his life. Merz is observed sitting in silence under a tree, a large pinecone in his hand. The film is ostensibly a portrait, but more importantly is a study of light in space and form in nature - central concerns in Merz's sculptural investigations.

Providence

Providence · 2018

A portrait of actor David Warner with hummingbirds.

Antigone

Antigone · 2018

Dean’s work is characterized by a sense of history, time and place, light quality, and the essence of the film itself. In line with these themes, the project will compose of a two-screen 35 mm film installation celebrating the quality and techniques of photochemical film. Derived from the origin of her own sister’s name, Antigone takes its starting point from the undramatized part between two of Sophocles’ three Theban plays, Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus, whose mythological character, Antigone, guides her blind and lame father, Oedipus, through the wilderness. The film will underscore the importance of film experimentation and highlight the endeavor of film, as a medium, to find a form between art, cinema and theater.

Portraits

Portraits · 2016

The 16-minute colour film observes Hockney smoking five cigarettes and thinking about painting in his Los Angeles studio, surrounded by a series of portrait paintings that featured in his 2016 exhibition at the RA (82 Portraits and 1 Still-life)

His Picture In Little

His Picture In Little · 2018

His Picture In Little

A portrait of three actors of different generations who have all portrayed Hamlet: David Warner, Stephen Dillane and Ben Whishaw.

One Hundred and Fifty Years of Painting

One Hundred and Fifty Years of Painting

One Hundred and Fifty Years of Painting

50 ½ minute 16 mm continuous film loop of artists Luchita Hurtado and Julie Mehretu in conversation. The idea for a film featuring Hurtado and Mehretu grew out of Dean’s incredible chance discovery, in 2019, that these two artists, both longtime friends of hers, shared the same birthday of November 28—and, moreover, that in 2020, Julie would be turning 50, and Luchita 100. Filmed over the course of a single day, January 3, 2020, in Hurtado’s Santa Monica apartment, the artists’ conversation meanders through subjects ranging from motherhood, to the environment, to their experiences immigrating to the U.S. as children, and, most movingly, to painting as a way of understanding one’s place in the world. description adapted from Jennifer King, associate curator of contemporary art at LACMA

Michael Hamburger

Michael Hamburger · 2007

Michael Hamburger

Continuing her recent collection of film portraits, Tacita Dean’s Michael Hamburger is a moving portrayal of the poet and translator, a resident of Middleton in Suffolk and great friend of W.G. Sebald.

Bubble House

Bubble House · 1999

While documenting the decayed hull of the Teignmouth Electron, my companion and I drove up the other road on the hurricane coast of the small island and came across the Bubble House. Deserted and half-complete, it was built by a Frenchman who, according to the people of the island, embezzled money from the American government and was now doing 35 years in Tampa prison for fraud. Both boat and house were welcome neglect on an otherwise over pampered island and sit side by side in this exhibition as they do on Cayman Brac.

Event for a Stage

Event for a Stage · 2015

Event for a Stage

MovieDocumentary

"'Event for a Stage’ is a 16mm film I made in 2015 with the actor Stephen Dillane. I normally project the work as film inside galleries and museums, and occasionally cinemas. I have always been steadfast about showing my films in the medium with which they were made and were always intended to be shown. I have therefore never allowed them to be streamed online or ever projected digitally. Film is a very different way of making and seeing a work, and over the years, I have campaigned to keep photochemical mediums available to artists and filmmakers, and I have found that I have done this best this by continuing to make and show my works in and on film."

Fata Morgana

Fata Morgana · 2022

MovieDocumentary

Recently, working on another project in Utah, Tacita Dean noticed that land in the distance was changing shape — as were the trucks moving along a distant highway. Using the little 16mm film she had in hand, she managed to film the elusive fata morgana.

Manhattan Mouse Museum

Manhattan Mouse Museum · 2011

Manhattan Mouse Museum

MovieDocumentary

Manhattan Mouse Museum takes a glimpse into the world of American Pop Art icon Claes Oldenburg as he tends to an assembly of small curios, objects, and artworks.

Geography Biography

Geography Biography · 2023

Geography Biography

MovieDocumentary

Sidney Felsen Decorates an Envelope

Sidney Felsen Decorates an Envelope · 2026

Sidney Felsen Decorates an Envelope

Sidney Felsen, who passed away in 2024 at age 99, was a true Los Angeles institution. He co-founded Gemini G.E.L. alongside Stanley Grinstein in 1966 and spent decades overseeing, photographing, and befriending some of the greatest postwar American artists of his generation. Sidney kept a quiet, joyful ritual: decorating the envelopes that carried artists’ royalty checks, using his beloved collection of postage and rubber stamps that filled his iconic office — a room filled with photographs of every artist he had ever worked with. It was Julie Mehretu who first introduced Tacita to Gemini. Knowing Sidney’s deep affection for Julie, Dean asked him to decorate an envelope for her. The result is this poignant 14-minute film: Sidney, impeccably dressed as always, at his desk, doing what he loved most.

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