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Arts Intel Report

Tacita Dean: Trial of the Finger

Tacita Dean, oh god, 2025.

1120 Seward St, Los Angeles, CA 90038

The British artist Tacita Dean won’t let photochemical film go gently into that good night. Born in Canterbury in 1965, Dean discovered a love for the medium when she moved to London and began working with 16-mm. film. But with the rise of digital, she worried that the form she loved—shooting on celluloid—would become obsolete. As a result, Dean doubled down on the practice, co-founding the campaign SaveFilm. This exhibition at Marian Goodman grew out of experiments with Polaroid cameras, in which Dean took pictures of broken Roman fingers from her own collection of ruins. Fascinated by how humans measure and describe objects using parts of their own body, the works are shaped by the artist’s momentary blindness when using the camera. —Maggie Turner

© Tacita Dean. Photo: Studio Tacita Dean/Simon Hanzer

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