Disappearance at the sea: image and time in Tacita Dean's work

Abstract

This article investigates the relation between time and image based on some works of Tacita Dean. When the artist recovers the tragic story of the English navigator Donald Crowhurst, who tried to go around the world and became entangled in his own narrative, she points out the intermittency of the image, whose temporality is marked by disappearances and returns. Dean's photographs and videos present us with a present that has been kept in suspension and populated by multiple pasts. However, what is glimpsed are the projections about the gaps and the remains of history, noting that the image itself is founded under the sign of absence. From this premise, Dean investigates our culture of obsolescence exploring themes such as architectural ruins, remnants of the past and history and memory itself. By making use of obsolete technologies in her work process, the artist inquiries about the nature of image itself and its intrinsic relationship with time.