ST. IVES, UK.-Tate St Ives will present Tacita Dean - Berlin Works 7 October 2005 - 15 January 2006. This will be the first major showing of the English artist Tacita Dean’s recent work in a British public gallery since 2001. Dean (b. 1965) trained at Falmouth College of Arts and has an enduring love of the Cornish landscape. She is fascinated with the medium of film not only for its close relationship to the passing of time but also for the possibilities film presents in the construction of narrative between its constituent parts of visual and sound track. This October’s Tate St Ives exhibition is the first occasion the city of Berlin has been presented as a particular subject of Dean’s art.

Dean is a leading artist of her generation and makes films, prints, and drawings on such diverse supports as blackboards and alabaster slabs. Her experience of Berlin, where she has lived since 2000, shapes the work she makes. Her instinctive radar for the shifts and ruptures in human affairs caused by history, approaching them via allusion and association, and the impact on the material culture and buildings, find perhaps their purest marker in the momentous events that have occurred in the city.

Berlin first found its way into her art through a film of a monument she had visited years earlier as an art student, in another era, its modernity now tarnished by the passing of time. Fernsehturm (TV Tower), 2001, explores Berlin’s TV tower in Alexander Platz in the centre of Berlin, formerly in the Eastern part of the city. High above the square, the TV Tower’s revolving restaurant commands a view across the entire city. For the first time Dean’s film included people. Their fluid presence in the slowly turning room was captured in an expansive film during which the day outside slipped into the darkness of night, while inside the warm glow of natural light gave way to harsh fluorescent strip lighting. These shifts; of perspective, light, locality, history and humanity from the minutae of daily activity to the grander patterns of planetary motion, from the restaurant interior to a limitless horizon outside, marked Dean’s first major work about the city.

In other films, Dean has turned to Berlin, its streets, trees and sounds. The view from her studio, of magpies flocking to and flying from the birch trees just outside has been captured in Pie, 2003, giving a more intimate reading of the presence of nature and the process of artistic activity, from within the city. She returned to contemplate the city’s divided history in Palast, 2005, a film reflecting (at times quite literally) the now ruined condition of the landmark Palace of the Republic erected during the era of the former German Democratic Republic.

Shown in the UK for the first time, Dean’s most recent work constructs an intimate portrait of Berlin and her experiences living there. A group of framed opera and theatre programmes, each with a section of the cover carefully excised, expose text and photographs beneath; why and when this was done, and by whom, forms the essential mystery of this work. Highly allusive, it suggests a personal experience wrapped up in the larger rhythms of history.