#serendipitious

Jasmine Mans

You call, at three in the morning.

I answer, we are the only two, in the world, awake.

Tacita Dean 

The Russian Ending is a series of twenty photogravures printed by Niels Borch Jensen and published by Peter Blum Editions. The title is drawn from a peculiar story of the early Danish film industry where two versions for each film were produced, a happy ending for American audiences and a tragic ending for the Russian market.

The images on the photo-etchings are from old postcards bought in flea markets, that depict accidents and disasters, and that have been superimposed with hand written notes similar to the ones employed in the cinema industry for directions, lighting instructions, sound and camera movements.

Found objects are recurrent in her work, in Die Regimentstochter (The Daughter of the Regiment, 2005), titled after Donizetti ‘s comic opera; Dean framed thirty-six opera programmes from the thirties that were bought on a Berlin flea market. The programmes had been disingenuously sliced, presumably to cut out the Swastikas that once adorned and embossed the covers. A glimpse of text, drawings or photographs are revealed through the small window cut.

In Girl Stowaway (1994), the story departs from a photograph found in a book, a photograph of Miss Jean Jeinnie, a sixteen-year-old Australian girl that stowaway aboard Hergozin Cecilie while on a holiday at the seaside. Dressed as a boy Jeinnie hid in the ship’s hold for 72 hours and travelled from Australia to England, latter writing her adventures in The Log of The Happy Girl.

 “… Her voyage was from Port Lincoln to Falmouth. It had a beginning and an end, and exists as recorded passage of time. My own journey follows no such linear narrative. It started at the moment I found the photograph but has meandered ever since, through unchartered research and no obvious destination. It has become a passage into history along the line that divides fact from fiction, and is more like a journey through an underworld of chance intervention and an epic encounter than any place I recognise. My story is about coincidence, and about what is invited and what is not “ – Tacita Dean

The serendipitous and the circumstantial are Dean’s modus operandi; the artist often describes it as Objective Chance defined by André Breton as “each time present the appearance of a signal, without being possible to say exactly which signal”. The signals are coincidences and trouvailles, events that the mind connects due to a certain formal resemblance (the individual adds meaning) or as events that are connected beyond thought (the meaning is part of the event).

For Tacita Dean the “meandering journey is completely hermetic and esoteric. I have to translate it somehow, but I know the journey, it’s quite autobiographical.”

 The Wrecking of the Ngahere, 2001 -  photo-etching on paper.

The Sinking of the SS Plympton, 2001 - photo-etching on paper.

Ship of Death, 2001 - photo-etching on paper.

So They Sank Her! 2001 - photo-etching on paper.

Die Explosion in dem Kanal, 2001 - photo-etching on paper.

The Tragedy of Hughesovka Bridge,  2001 - photo-etching on paper.

Vesuvio,  2001 - photo-etching on paper.

Beautiful Sheffield ,  2001 - photo-etching on paper.