One Image chosen by Nina Strand

‘It’s not working’, my friend tells me while we watch Tacita Dean’s installation Geography Biography in the 18th-century corn-exchange building, Bourse de Commerce, now taken over by one of the richest men in France and showing his glorious collection along with this new work.

In the beautiful rotunda, Dean has had a round pavilion custom-built. Inside it is a circular structure that houses two film projectors, with benches running all the way around the machines. The 18-minute work is shown as a diptych with two projections that slowly rotate. Each projection shows moving images juxtaposed with stills, collages created from discarded material from Dean's previous films, alongside old postcards from her own collection. The artist describes the result as a kind of unintentional self-portrait, and as a memento-mori series.

I’m enthralled by the display, while my friend is more interested in talking about her new love. She thinks they’re struggling because he’s interested in both genders. ‘All this fluidity makes me exhausted’, she sighs. While she talks, we watch a film of a person diving from an impossibly high cliff into the sea. I wonder if she makes the obvious connection to her experience, but I don’t mention it. We move along with the projection, round and round in the room. A baby’s happy feet are juxtaposed with a picture of a man’s suited legs, his shoes very shiny. We smile at the accidental performance which happens when the projection lands on the entrance, where a tired security guard sits. She is suddenly part of the work.

I love the effect of the old-fashioned projector, and tell my friend what Dean once said about analogue and digital film: that they’re as different from each other as oil painting is from watercolour. She starts to laugh and says Dean is right, and that maybe she herself is just too analogue for her guy.

Tacita Dean, Geography Biography, 2023. 35 mm film diptych, film still. Courtesy the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery (New York/Paris) and Frith Street Gallery (London). Avant l'orage, Bourse de Commerce - Pinault Collection, 2023© Tadao Ando Architect & Associates, Niney ett Marca Architectes, agence Pierre-Antoine Gatier. Photo: Aurélien Mole. Courtesy Pinault Collection.