Tacita Dean’s work belongs to that rare category of art that does not chase the present, but slows it down until it becomes visible. In Kyiv, her presence takes on a particular weight: her films, photographs, and drawings do not simply describe the world, they hold it still long enough for its vulnerability to appear. That is why her work feels so at home in an exhibition that treats joy not as escape, but as resistance.
Dean has spent years building an art of delicate insistence. She returns to analog film, hand-based processes, and carefully composed images at a time when speed and instant reproducibility dominate visual culture. This is not nostalgia. It is a way of insisting that looking still matters, and that an image can be more than information: it can be a site of memory, duration, and almost tactile attention.
At the Pinchuk Art Centre, this language becomes especially meaningful. The exhibition frames joy as something active, something earned rather than given. In that context, Dean’s work does not arrive as a decorative pause. It brings a quieter kind of intensity, one that understands how precarious beauty can be, and how much care is needed to keep it alive.
Her film If I Were in the Adlon continues this line of thought. Rather than treating portraiture as a fixed likeness, Dean approaches it as a relationship between people, space, and time. The film’s intimacy matters: it does not try to explain its subjects from a distance, but lets presence unfold gradually. What emerges is not just a portrait of Borys and Vita Mykhailova, but a meditation on memory, displacement, and companionship.
The same sensitivity runs through Sakura (Totsube II). The cherry blossoms are not presented as symbols of easy beauty. They are fragile, seasonal, and sustained by visible structures of care. Dean’s intervention with pencil and color does not overwhelm the image; it deepens its sense of delicacy. The result is an image that seems to hover between preservation and disappearance.
What makes Dean so compelling in Kyiv is that her work never pretends fragility can be solved. Instead, it shows fragility as a condition of experience itself. Her art asks for patience, but rewards it with images that feel alive in a way that faster forms of seeing rarely are.
In that sense, Tacita Dean is not merely exhibited in Kyiv. She is in dialogue with it. Her work meets a place marked by historical pressure and present uncertainty with a vocabulary of attention, silence, and persistence. And that is precisely what gives it force.
Tacita Dean’s art does not resist time by defeating it; it resists time by making time visible.
Grégory Herpe
Still Joy—From Ukraine Into the World
From May 9–August 1, 2026
1/3-2 Velyka Vasylkivska / Baseyna str., Kyiv, Ukraine
Tel: +38(067) 243-18-77 Mail: info@pinchukartcentre.org
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