culture
TIFF’s New Free Exhibition Celebrates and Elegizes Celluloid
Tacita Dean / Daniel Young and Christian Giroux profiles the conceptual artists' gorgeous and absorbing experiments with film stock in the potentially waning days of the medium.
Still from JG.
Tacita Dean / Daniel Young & Christian Giroux
TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)
June 12–August 23
Free
Christopher Nolan found an unlikely ally earlier this year in Tacita Dean, the Berlin-based English visual artist and Turner Prize nominee. Dean shared the stage with the undisputed champion of the gut-rattling IMAX spectacular at a summit dedicated to the preservation of film in a digital era that has increasingly marginalized and endangered it. While the maximalist pop storyteller Nolan and the conceptualist Dean might seem to make for strange aesthetic bedfellows, a new TIFF exhibition screening at the HBSC gallery from now until August pairing Dean’s 2015 film JG with Canadian artists’ Daniel Young and Christian Giroux’s Berlin 2012 / 1983 makes the case for the textural particularity and impact of celluloid more than all of Nolan’s nondescript blockbusters combined.
Still from Berlin 2012 / 1983.
The latest in TIFF’s series of free summer exhibitions of moving-image artworks, Tacita Dean / Daniel Young & Christian Giroux focuses on artists working with 35mm and playing as much with the relationship between time and place as with the medium of film. The first space of the HBSC gallery is devoted to Sobey Award winners Young and Giroux, who have earned international acclaim for their sculptures as well as silent film installations. True to its hybridized title, Berlin 2012 / 1983 is a two-channel 35mm installation that holds a pair of adjacent views of the city in check at once. The presentation is serial in the way of both an old slide show and a time-lapse montage, challenging both description and interpretation. That is to say, on each screen, a procession of static frontal images of a given architectural feature of the city, moving at four frames per second, gives way to another set after what seems like the hard blinking of the camera’s eyes. Taking the installation in is either a serene or a disconcerting experience, depending on how you approach it: you can either stroll through the images on a given screen, as it were — as if closing one eye to better focus with the other — or try to capture both streams in one’s mind eye at once.
Still from JG.
Down the hall from Young and Giroux’s installation, one finds a hallway framing a number of striking stills from Dean’s JG, segueing into a separate room for the film itself. Dean’s work tends to engage with the possibilities of analogue film, and JG is no different. Outside of her own earlier work, there are two major intertexts here, both of which are likely obscure for the casual spectator. The first is Robert Smithson’s earthwork Spiral Jetty — a 1500-foot-long coil of rock, salt, and earth in Utah — which was the subject of an earlier Dean film about her unsuccessful attempt to find the sculpture. The second is the work of the author JG Ballard, after whom the film takes its title and a number of audio fragments about the spiralling nature of time.
These are fruitful but inessential reference points in what proves to be a hypnotic and gorgeous conceptual film that layers different environments and temporal registers together through Dean’s in-camera effects work. The helpful press notes explain that this surreal aesthetic, which variously resembles Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory and the uncanny appearance of the monolith jutting into the real world in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, involves masking the aperture gate and passing the film through the camera multiple times to juxtapose different fragments of exposed film in a single frame. Conceptual artists will certainly appreciate that craft, but anyone can marvel at its effect, which is that incongruous spaces seem to be bleeding into one another in-camera, apparently without the aid of any digital trickery.
In addition to the exhibition, TIFF will be hosting a pair of related events to put both works in context. On June 18, curator Axel Wiedler will host Young and Giroux for a free conversation on the architectural element of their installation, along with a screening of a selection of their earlier films. Closer to the end of the exhibition, on August 15, TIFF will also be offering a free screening of Dean’s film Kodak, which was shot in 16mm at the Kodak factory in France shortly before production of 16mm film stock was completely halted. We haven’t seen Kodak for ourselves yet, but we have a feeling it’s a more evocative and fitting elegy for film stock than Nolan’s Interstellar.