TACITA DEAN

“Making images like a gambler in light, I must acknowledge that my preference for using film is bound up in the blindness it necessitates in order for me to see.” Tacita Dean, 2018

The renowned British European artist Tacita Dean has been part of the history of Serralves’s programming since her solo exhibition in 2002. Inspired by this museum, she went on to film her work Boots (2003) in the Casa de Serralves, which was then acquired for the Collection.

This exhibition is an exciting opportunity to show Boots alongside her new and ambitious film project Antigone (2018), which premiered last year in her simultaneous trilogy of exhibitions that took place in the Royal Academy of Arts, the National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery in London. Antigone has been many years in the making and the central ideas have manifested in other works over the past three decades, most significantly in Boots. This double-screen 35mm one-hour film is an epic exploration of the artist’s sister’s name Antigone, which features poet and playwright Anne Carson and actor Stephen Dillane. The film diptych evokes the eponymous mythological figure and her blind and lame father, Oedipus and the idea of their journey into the wilderness between the two plays by Sophocles, Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus.

This important presentation has also brought together other earlier works that follow the trajectory of her thinking in relation to Antigone as early as 1991 and includes two of the artist’s most recent large-scale blackboard drawings as well as a multi-part photogravure from the Serralves Collection.

Concept: Tacita Dean and Marta Moreira de Almeida

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