NSW Minister for Tourism and the Arts, Ben Franklin today announced the 2023-24 Sydney International Art Series will make a highly anticipated return in 2023, featuring the works of three internationally renowned artists as a Sydney exclusive next summer. The program includes a major exhibition by acclaimed artist Tacita Dean at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, which will premiere works never seen in the Southern Hemisphere; while at the Art Gallery of New South Wales the largest survey of artist Louise Bourgeois ever displayed in Australia and an exhibition comprehensively spanning the oeuvre of Wassily Kandinsky.
Tacita Dean’s solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, opening on 8 December, will be the largest in-depth presentation of the artist’s work in the Southern Hemisphere and is curated by Suzanne Cotter, Director and Jane Devery, Senior Curator, Exhibitions, with assistance by Megan Robson, Associate Curator, Exhibitions. The exhibition will bring together important artworks, the substantial majority created by the artist in the last five years, including new and recent films, monumental drawings and installations that convey Dean’s extraordinarily beautiful investigations into chance, memory, entropy, history and the passing of time.
One of the most important living artists of our times, Tacita Dean (b. 1965, United Kingdom) is renowned for her singular poetic vision and distinctive body of works, which encompass film, photography, sound, installation, drawing, printmaking and collage.
Based in Berlin and Los Angeles, Dean is best known for her film works that draw connections between the past and the present and reflect the materiality and history of filmmaking. The artist’s use of the analogue medium in the digital age speaks to the conditions of precarity in the contemporary era. At a time of constant change, her works are distinguished by meticulous attention to detail that encourages slow and careful observation of the surrounding world. The artist notes:
“My relationship to film begins at that moment of shooting and ends in the moment of projection. Along the way, there are several stages of magical transformation that imbue the work with varying layers of intensity. This is why the film image is different from the digital image: it is not only emulsion versus pixels, or light versus electronics, but something deeper – something to do with poetry.”
This major exhibition will provide audiences with an unprecedented opportunity to explore Dean’s wide-ranging practice. A remarkable sensory experience, it will feature significant works that have never been exhibited in Australia including recent film works, monumental chalkboard drawings, important photographic and print series, and spectacular installations that have resulted from the artist’s designs for the highly acclaimed The Dante Project, a collaboration with choreographer Wayne McGregor and composer Thomas Ades for The Royal Ballet.
Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Suzanne Cotter said, “Tacita Dean is undoubtedly one of today’s greatest living artists and truly an artist of our time. We are delighted to be presenting this major exhibition of her powerful and deeply human work to a broad audience in Australia.”
Minister for Tourism and the Arts Ben Franklin said, “Tacita Dean, Louise Bourgeois and Wassily Kandinsky are three of the biggest names in the art world and I am thrilled we will have them exclusively in Sydney. Securing these extraordinary, world-renowned artists for Sydney International Arts Series reaffirms Sydney as Australia’s cultural capital and a global hub for the arts, where art and creativity are celebrated and nurtured. It is going to be a highlight for so many visitors from interstate and overseas next summer.”
“Around 28,000 art lovers are estimated will visit Sydney to experience these incredible collections next summer, injecting more than $21 million of visitor expenditure into the NSW economy. Bringing the best international art to Sydney and delivering world-class cultural experiences is a key pillar of our commitment to make Sydney and NSW the major events capital and premier visitor economy of the Asia Pacific.”
Artist Tacita Dean said, “I’m delighted and very excited to be returning to Australia for this exhibition. I have always had a very happy time in the country and I’m pleased to be able to show ‘my Australian film’, Event for a Stage in the city in which it was made, alongside a series of my most recent works. I’ve always had a very good relationship with Australian curators, all of them amazing women, and I’m really looking forward to being among everyone again.”
Exhibition highlights:
Direct from its presentation at the Bourse de Commerce Pinault Collection in Paris, the MCA will premiere in Australia a major new work, Geography Biography (2023). Currently in production, the experimental film is Dean’s most biographical work to date and incorporates material drawn from past films and the artist’s personal archive. This ambitious work showcases Dean’s mastery of analogue filmmaking techniques notably her specially developed ‘aperture gate masking system’ which enables her to collage Super-8 and 16mm film within the 35mm film.
Alongside the major new film work, the artist has created a large-scale chalk on blackboard drawing, The Wreck of Hope (
Dean was commissioned to create the set design and costumes for The Dante Project, a new ballet inspired by Dante Alighieri’s narrative poem The Divine Comedy (1321), which premiered at The Royal Opera House, London in October 2021. The exhibition at the MCA will include a range of works created by Dean for the ballet, including the film shown as part of the final act, Paradise (2021). Presented in an architecturally designed pavilion, Paradise is a 35mm Cinemascope film that uses the circular planetary motifs that feature throughout Dante’s poem, the vibrant colour palette of the abstract film is inspired by the work of artist William Blake (1757–1827). The film’s soundtrack is a MIDI digital simulation of Thomas Adès’s composition Paradiso.
The most recent work in Dean’s ongoing acclaimed series of film portraits, One Hundred and Fifty Years of Painting (2021) is a filmed conversation between the painters Luchita Hurtado and Julie Mehretu. Realising that the two artists, who share a birthday fifty years apart, would collectively turn one hundred and fifty years old in 2020, Dean filmed them in conversation in Hurtado’s apartment in Santa Monica in the first days of 2020. In this intimate and illuminating film, the two women discuss their respective artistic practices and the medium of painting, as well as their lives and personal trajectories.
The MCA would like to thank Strategic Sponsor of this exhibition Destination NSW. The Sydney International Arts Series was created in 2010 by the NSW Government’s tourism and major events agency, Destination NSW in partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia and Art Gallery of New South Wales, to bring the world’s most outstanding artists to Sydney.
Tacita Dean will open at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia on 8 December 2023 and be on display until 3 March 2024.
