MCA unveils Tacita Dean’s poetically-charged art

Tacita Dean, Study for Purgatory (Threshold), 2020, coloured pencil on Fuji Velvet paper mounted on paper, image courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London © the artist. Associate Professor Donna Brett, Chair of Art History, explores the work of British visual artist Tacita Dean - known for her film-works, photography, drawings and installations - in a major new exhibition at Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art. The first time I saw one of Tacita Dean's monumental film-works it was by chance. Soaring the heights of the Tate's Turbine Hall,  FILM 2011  was an entrancing visual elegy to art, nature and time. My second chance encounter was in 2018 at the Royal Academy where Dean's exhibition  Landscape  was on show. Cooling off on a rare London summer's day watching the hour-long Antigone I drifted in out of a strange sense of euphoria. The idea of coincidence and "chance" drove much of the Surrealists' work from literature to the visual arts and is also at the centre of Dean's artistic process.