A-Z: Tacita Dean

Tacita Charlotte Dean OBE (born 1965) is an English visual artist who works primarily in film. She is one of the Young British Artists, and was a nominee for the Turner Prize in 1998.^[1] She lives and works in Berlin.^[2]In 2001 Dean published Floh, a book in two parts that featured found photographs from the flea markets of Europe and America.^[25] Dean said of Floh: "I do not want to give these images explanations: descriptions by the finder about how and where they were found, or guesses as to what stories they might or might not tell. I want them to keep the silence of the fleamarket; the silence they had when I found them; the silence of the lost object."^[25] Similarly, in 2002 Dean created Czech Photos (1991-2002), a series of over 326 unedited photographs presented in a box for intimate engagement. The black and white photographs show a city in the moments before radical change, already somehow out of date the second they were taken.^[26] Washington Cathedral (2002) is a series of more than 130 found postcards from the first half of the last century showing various imagined versions of the cathedral in Washington, DC before it was completed. Palindrome is a newspaper project celebrating the palindromic date 20.02 2002, which was inspired by numbers painted by Marcel Broodthaers's on a beam in his studio. In 2005, Dean began work on a series of found postcards featuring trees, which she transformed by painting out all the background detail with white gouache.