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festival VISUAL ART
TACITA DEAN: WOMAN WITH A
RED HAT Exploration of the artist’s approaches to theatre, performance and narrative
Given that practically every space in Edinburgh gets turned into a theatre in August, it’s appropriate that the theme of performance echoes through the Edinburgh Art Festival programme. Fruitmarket curator Fiona Bradley explores this theme in the work of Tacita Dean, who has returned to it a number of times over the last 25 years. The central work here is ‘Event for a Stage’, a i lmed performance by actor Stephen Dillane screened roughly hourly. Like Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which Dillane quotes from, it manages to explore the power of performance, while still using that magic on its audience. Her 1996 work ‘Foley Artist’ works in a similar way: she
i lms two foley artists creating the sound effects for a i lm: clacking high heels on wet newspaper, rippling a big sheet of metal for thunder. The magic is debunked, and yet it isn’t: what they’re doing seems as magical as ever.
Dean’s medium of choice is i lm (always analogue, not digital) but she also references it in works such as ‘The Russian Ending’, a series of prints made using found postcards to create ‘sad’ endings for a series of i ctitious i lms, and ‘When i rst I raised the tempest’, a blackboard drawing nearly 10-metres long which has a i lmic quality.
Recent work has focused on actors. ‘His picture in little’ is a miniature portrait featuring three actors who have played Hamlet – Dillane, David Warner and Ben Whishaw – using a masking technique to place their portraits in the same frame. By inviting performers not to perform, she poses questions not only about acting but about the nature of portraiture itself. (Susan Mansi eld) ■ Fruitmarket Gallery, until 30 Sep, free. ●●●●●
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1–8 Aug 2018 THE LIST FESTIVAL 123