TATE: TACITA DEAN : TURBINE HALL

     Tacita Dean was born in Canterbury, Kent. She considered as one of ‘Young British Artists’. Tacita Dean’s film is the first work in The Unilever Series that is devoted to the moving image. And the twelfth commission in The Unilever Series at Tate Modern in London has been realized by the Berlin. The work ‘Entitled Film’ is 11minutes silent, 35mm looped film projected onto monolith standing 13 meters tall at the end of a darkened Turbine Hall. I think the presented location of the film is on the advantage that the walk from the empty entrance down the ramp, builds up the viewer’s expectation of finding something extraordinary in the darkness behind the staircase. In that case, though the art work had better be extraordinary and looks very special.  The work Entitled Film deals with the typical nature of the analogue film in contrast to the digital image. By flipping the traditional horizontal format of the cinema screen into a vertical position she moves its size and shape with the insistent vertical girders along the north and south walls. As the film begins we realize we are looking at a strip of celluloid, complete with sprockets on either side to attach it to the projector.

     The thing I liked the most about her work was the way she used the screen as her 'canvas’. She creates a swiftly moving collage of cinematic techniques and possibilities, such as; cuts, fades, superimpositions, and bursts of colour alternating with black and white still photographs and archival footage. Dean keeps emphasising the verticality of the screen by showing balloons and bubbles floating downward, an escalator moving upwards, and streams and fountains running from the top of the screen to the bottom. And I also liked the little triangle which keep changes the colour and the object when every time it moved. As you watch transfixed, details lifted from paintings by Magritte and Mondrian appear and disappear, while Eliasson’s mirrored sun flashes by, as does the famous mountain that is the logo of Paramount pictures. These kinds of techniques made my interest to keep up on film and not just mine but it’s grabbing the viewer’s attention and holding it long enough to make us want to return to see it all over again.