About Tacita Dean

Tacita Dean was born in 1965 in Canterbury, England. She is widely recognized for a conceptual practice that encompasses film, photography, drawing, and installation. Her artworks consistently engage with chance, memory, and the passage of time, often returning to maritime subjects, remote landscapes, and sites marked by abandonment or decay. These motifs function not as symbols, but as material conditions through which time becomes visible.

Dean's artworks are marked by a sustained attention to human traces within natural and built environments. She records how these traces persist, erode, or transform over time. This sensitivity to duration and entropy is central to her broader inquiry into how images bear witness to lived experience. Rather than constructing narrative resolution, her artworks allow observation, accumulation, and slowness to shape meaning.

Film occupies a pivotal position in Dean's practice, both as a medium and as a subject of reflection. She has consistently defended analogue film, particularly 16mm, for its physical presence, unpredictability, and vulnerability to chance. Her films frequently employ long takes and static compositions, inviting viewers to engage with subtle shifts in light, movement, and atmosphere. The process of filming remains visible, reinforcing the material reality of the medium itself.

Through this commitment, Dean articulates a resistance to digital clarity and control. She has described analogue film as a space of the unknown, where imperfection and contingency are productive rather than limiting. Her artworks thus combine technical rigor with a philosophical inquiry into perception, memory, and loss, foregrounding the fragile relationship between image-making and time.

Notable exhibitions

Tacita Dean was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1998 and has since received wide institutional recognition for her contribution to contemporary art. She was awarded the Hugo Boss Prize at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 2006, followed by the Kurt Schwitters Prize in 2009, and was elected a Royal Academician in 2008. More recently, she was named a National Academician by the National Academy of Design in 2025 and received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of the Arts Helsinki in 2024.

Dean has been the subject of major solo exhibitions at leading international institutions, including Tate Modern and the Royal Academy of Arts in London, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen, the New Museum in New York, and the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig in Vienna.

In the past decade, her artworks have been presented at the Menil Collection in Houston, the Bourse de Commerce, Pinault Collection in Paris, MUDAM Luxembourg, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, Kunstmuseum Basel, EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art, the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen, and the Serralves Museum in Porto. Born in 1965 in Canterbury, United Kingdom, Dean's practice has been consistently positioned within a global institutional context shaped by sustained engagement with film, time, and material process.