Tacita Dean Knihy

Documenting Tacita Dean's new film work on the many resonances of Sophocles' drama Tacita Dean's (born 1965) Antigone(2018) is an hour-long 35mm anamorphic film, and is the most complex work to date by the British-European artist. The name of this work combines the artist's personal history with the mythological world order: Antigone is the heroine in the eponymous drama by the Greek poet Sophocles, and is also the name of Tacita Dean's older sister. The name creates a double bond full of ambivalences and is the reason for Dean's exploration of the character. The leitmotif of the work is blindness: Antigonerevolves around fundamental questions of foresight and destiny, seeing and not seeing, and metaphorical blindness as a necessity for artistic work. It is also a thoroughly analogue work: Dean assembled the film images, which appear like collages, with and inside the camera using sophisticated stencils and multiple exposures. The result of this experimental project is both a pioneering achievement and a masterpiece. The book documents the narrative of the making and impact of this work.

Face to Face presents a selection of portraits of artists by three of the most prominent portrait artists of our time. Bringing together the diverse and distinctive work of Tacita Dean, Brigitte Lacombe, and Catherine Opie, this book forms an investigation into the charged genre of portraiture and its various approaches, navigating tensions between intimacy and publicity. While the three artists collected here share a wide set of historical touchstones, each deploys the camera Dean exploits cinema’s capacity for duration; Lacombe takes her cameras out on assignment; Opie works in the tradition of the studio photograph. Often overlapping in the subjects depicted, Face to Face offers an opportunity to look closely at bracing, intimate, and resonant portraits of the seminal thinkers and makers that these artists have encountered across the fields of music, painting, photography, film, and literature, among them Hilton Als, Maya Angelou, Richard Avedon, Joan Didion, David Hockney, Joan Jonas, Patti Smith, Kara Walker, and many other others. Published in conjunction with an exhibition at the International Center of Photography (ICP), New York, the book includes essays by the exhibition’s curator, Helen Molesworth, and the artist and writer Jarrett Earnest.

Seven Books Grey is an updated, expanded version of Tacita Dean's Seven Books (2003), and is an exploration of Dean's oeuvre as it straddles film, drawing, photography, writing and book-making. Each book has a different focusand together they are an accurate survey of Dean's work to date. Book One: Complete Works and Filmography 1991-2011 - Book Two: Selected Writings 1992-2011 (Dean's writings)-Book Three: A Panegyric, Gaeta, Edwin Parker (three projects made with and about Cy Twombly) - Book Four: Film Works with Merce Cunningham - Book Five: Footage (artist's book with a text by Marina Warner taking a cultural-historical lookat the foot and the significance of limping) - Book Six: Post-War Germany and 'Objective Chance': W.G. Sebald, Joseph Beuys and Tacita Dean (essay by Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes) - Book Seven: Essays on the Work of Tacita Dean (texts by Wolfram Pichler, Peter Burger, Douglas Crimp and Achim Hochdorfer)