Starting on 24 May 2023, the Bourse de Commerce — Pinault Collection has invited Tacita Dean to present an exhibition of new works conceived in resonance with the season Before the Storm which began at the museum on 8 February. This is the artist’s first major exhibition at a French institution since her show at the Musée d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris in 2003. All of these works were created specifically for her exhibition Geography Biography.

Dean uses film, photography, drawing, collage. Her work is distinguished by the attention she pays to time, by the invitation she launches to chance, with uncertainty as a corollary. To the dematerialization of images, to their frenetic consumption, the artist responds with slowness, with the work of the hand, by reinvesting, with applied patience, the materiality of these mediums and the amplitude of their formats. With chalk, brush, analog film, through silver photography, she invites you to experience the work physically, playing with scales, between the monumental and the infinitesimal, the eternal and the ephemeral.

In Gallery 2, geological time intersects with the transience of a flowering: temporalities contrast to better help us grasp the ineffable. A unique design, The Wreck of Hope (2022), more than seven meters long, reproduces a thousand-year-old glacier in chalk: the fragility of the material makes both delicately and radically perceptible that of this collapsing giant from the depths of time. Photographs Sakura (Taki I) (2022) and Sakura (Jindai I) (2023) show sakura trees, Japanese prunus, whose branches are buttressed to support their ephemeral blooms, a symbol of the cyclical rebirth of life. By retouching these monuments with colored pencil, the artist exposes both their venerability and their vulnerability. The artist shows here these immortals on the way to extinction, with the strength and tension that no current image can contain.

In the orb of the Rotunda, after the changing forest of Danh Vo, Dean inscribes a circular pavilion, draws a circle within the circle, like an eclipse. Beneath the ample painted panorama which stretches above the visitors and which depicts the commercial and colonial expansion projects of France under the Third Republic, the artist inscribes a more personal geography. Geography Biography (2023), 35mm film—produced for this exhibition at the Bourse de Commerce—presented by the artist in this darkened space, draws an autobiographical cartography: the images filmed in various parts of the world are embedded in postcards of the 20th century of its collection, to offer recomposed landscapes, to revive distant and dreamed temporalities, fragments of life and memory of the artist. Thus the 35mm film presented in the form of a diptych, according to the artist, becomes “a very physical manifestation of time: twenty-four images per second. When we work with a physical material, we are dealing with a physical time, not with something hermetic or discontinuous.”