Tacita Dean was born in 1965 in Canterbury, England, and she currently lives and works in Berlin. While she operates in a variety of mediums, Dean is best known for her films, which she began exhibiting in galleries in the mid-1990s. She is fascinated by the dynamics between the materiality of celluloid and the passage of time, which she employs in the service of narrative, however apparent or oblique, and regardless of her subjects, which include artists, anachronistic architecture, and landscape. Characterized by static camera positions, long takes, and ambient sound, her films are imbued with an uncanny stillness that elicits meditative forms of attention. Dean’s acute regard for light and subtle motion results in singular evocations of sensibility and place, the spirit of the moment, and the essence of film itself.
Dean has had recent solo exhibitions at Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, Denmark (2014), the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City (2014), Film Forum, New York (2014), Marian Goodman Gallery, New York (2013), the New Museum, New York (2012), Tate Modern, London (2011), Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig – MUMOK, Vienna (2011), Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, Paris (2011), and Academie der Kunste, Berlin (2011). Her work was included in the Venice Biennale in 2003 and 2005, and in dOCUMENTA (13) (2012). She has been in recent group shows at Tate Britain, London (2014 and 2013), the 19th Biennale of Sydney (2014), Hamburger Kunsthalle, Germany (2013), the New Museum, New York (2013, 2011, and 2008), Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2012), Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, Paris (2010 and 2009), the Guggenheim Museum, New York (2010), the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC (2010 and 2008), and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2010). Dean has received the Aachen Art Prize (2002), the Sixth Benesse Prize at the 51st Venice Biennale (2005), the Hugo Boss Prize at the Guggenheim Museum, New York (2006), and the Kurt Schwitters Prize (2009). She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1998 and was awarded a DAAD scholarship for Berlin in 2000.
