Over the past fifteen years, Tacita Dean has created a body of work that is fascinating for its unconventional use of film and its unruly beauty. With twenty film installations and numerous photograph works and large-format drawings, “Analogue” is the most extensive presentation of her work thus far. Exhibited in seven island-like spaces, her films, drawings and photographs establish a mutual dialogue.

The films are usually brief 16-mm-projections shown in loops. They are “images” that may move but do not run away with the story, instead remain present and effective as images. The films could be described as documentary if not for the specific movement of the camera that turns them into something quite different.

The camera probingly films objects and places and captures their light; it feels out surfaces, bringing out unnoticed phenomena of the visible and then losing them again. Crucial to recording these images is finding the right moment that contains the shift from the still present to the just disappeared. This moment cannot be captured by force; it must be sought and courted, but ultimately it simply has to be hit upon and seen. This gives Dean’s cinematic images something magical and unreal.

Tacita Dean (born in Canterbury in 1965) lives and works in Berlin. Her medium is analogue film, but she also shows expert mastery of photography and drawing. In her densely poetic works, she explores subjects and people on the verge of disappearance—increasingly including 16 mm film itself, which is under threat from digital technology. In 1998, Dean was nominated for the prestigious Turner Prize. She gained further international recognition for her 2012 installation “FILM” in the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern.

The Sign Painting Project by Francis Alÿs is an extensive exemplary project created over a period of four years (1993 – 97) by Alÿs in collaboration with several professional sign painters in Mexico City – namely, the rotulistas Juan García, Enrique Huerta and Emilio Rivera.

Around 1992 Alÿs began to paint small oil paintings in a style he had borrowed from the advertising billboards on the streets. In order to blur his authorship and keep the market value of his paintings as low as possible, Alÿs had the rotulistas produce enlarged copies of his “originals”, but in a way that was supposed to be marked by the individual style of the copyist in question.

Following simple rules, Alÿs launched a project in which central questions of artistic practice are raised in an uncommonly visual and poetic way, namely, the theme of collaboration and related questions of authorship, originals and copies. By bringing together some of the paintings the exhibition attempts to show not only the imaginative ensemble but also to encourage discussion of the practice of the “collaboration” expressed therein. In his most recent projects Alÿs engages in this practice more than ever before, and the powerful visual beginnings are found in the Sign Painting Project.

Francis Alÿs (born in Antwerp in 1959) lives and works in Mexico City. Having trained as an architect, he switched to art in 1991 as a means of exploring both urban space and landscapes, sometimes alone and sometimes through public actions. He creates both subtle and fleeting interventions and extensive, awe-inspiring actions. His serial projects such as Sign Painting Project (1993–1997) or the travelling exhibitions of his “Fabiola” collection take the relationship between art and authorship as their subject.