
Geography Biography
2023
Geography Biography unfolds as a 35mm portrait-format anamorphic film diptych, presenting two simultaneous projections that together run eighteen and a half minutes in silence. Tacita Dean works in color alongside passages of black and white, allowing the two channels to breathe independently while sustaining a quiet conversation across the divide between them. The portrait orientation, so deliberately chosen, resists the horizontal sweep traditionally associated with cinematic landscape and instead draws the eye upward and inward, lending the work an almost meditative verticality that suits its subject matter of place, time, and personal geography. Dean has long treated the analog film medium as both material and argument, and Geography Biography extends that commitment with particular elegance. The work engages her recurring preoccupation with how physical locations accumulate biographical weight, how a life becomes inseparable from the terrains and coordinates it has moved through. The silence here is not absence but a condition of attention, asking the viewer to read light, grain, and the passage of time as a language unto itself. The anamorphic format, typically associated with widescreen spectacle, is here turned on its side, compressing and elongating the image in ways that feel simultaneously intimate and strange. Produced in an edition of four plus one artist's proof, with this being the third of four, Geography Biography is available through Marian Goodman Gallery Los Angeles. Works of this scale and technical specificity from Dean are relatively rare on the primary market, and the film arrives at a moment when her position as one of the foremost practitioners of analog moving image art is thoroughly cemented. For collectors who have followed her practice, this diptych represents a substantial and characteristically rigorous addition.
- Medium
- 35mm portrait-format anamorphic film diptych, color with black and white, silent; 18 1/2 min. Edition of 4 plus 1 artist's proof (#3/4)
Notes
From MGG LA — Trial of the Finger. SKU: 26544.
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