Tacita Dean – Kodak: exposure in the dark

Tacita Dean is renowned for her 16mm film installations as well as for other works closely related to the films including photogravures, drawings on alabaster, overpainted photographs, sound recordings on magnetic tape, installation works and objets trouvés. Running through all her work is an obsession with time, with perception, with the nature of seeing: with things that lie outside of time or on the verge of disappearance.

Yesterday I went to the Tacita Dean exhibition at ACCA (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art), in Melbourne. Kodak (2006) is a 44 minute, 16mm film installation shot by Dean at the Kodak factory in Chalon-sur-Saône, France. The film production facility was closing down; Dean is here to witness a point of departure.

I’m in awe of Dean’s films, but you have to ’stay the pace’ to truly breathe in the lost spaces, timelessness and sense of ‘passing’ that her work evokes. Kodak is set in a factory. I generally associate factories with noise and bright lights, but the Kodak factory space that Dean presents is deeply meditative. Nobody seems in a hurry as they routinely go about their work. Sound is subdued, yet constant throughout, while the ‘production line’ of film is seen as rythmic and fluid. The lighting in the factory and the colours created by the celluloid running through the machinery appear symbiotic.

The factory workers, in their white boiler suits, quietly load and unload large spools of film. These methodical workers hover about like nurses comforting a dying patient. They are attentive, professional, but have the demeanour of those who know they are witnessing life ebbing away. In this instance, Dean is capturing celluloid in its death throes, threading its way through miles of machinery: celluloid without a story, but still able to project abstract images of glistening colour – flashes of peacock blue and smudgy red – determined to show its vibrancy even though its days are numbered.

Dean makes you stop and think. Her films make you stop and watch. It’s only by staying in a moment for much longer than the moment, that Dean’s camera forces you to see differently. Or maybe it’s not that you see, but that you begin to absorb the small, seemingly insignificant details – the quietness. About process. About the beauty in the banal. About the things we miss, because we just don’t look hard enough. About the death of industries and how things vanish while we are looking the other way. Of knowing too late. Of d.i.s.i.n.t.e.g.r.a.t.i.o.n.

Kodak is one of several films at the exhibition. If only I had time to tell you about the English man and his apple orchard, or Merce Cunningham. Both are mesmerising. Go see for yourself!

Tacinta Dean showing at ACCA
6 June 2009 – 2 August 2009