“I’ve always been slightly afraid of actors,” Tacita Dean says, midway through talking about Woman with a Red Hat, her enticingly named exhibition that forms the Fruitmarket Gallery’s contribution to this year’s Edinburgh Art Festival. Given that Woman with a Red Hat, which opens hot on the heels of a trilogy of solo exhibitions running concurrently across London, is based entirely around theatrical performance, this sounds like an odd thing to say. Especially as its centre-piece, Event for a Stage (2015), is an hour-long film featuring a solo performance by Tony award-winning actor Stephen Dillane in a black box theatre space dressed as Oedipus. “Working with Stephen was a huge learning curve for me,” says Dean, whose artistic career began with the YBA generation, and who was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1998. “I don’t think I work with actors in a functional way, and that’s all to do with my inability, willfully or otherwise, to work within linear narrative cinema. I tel
An archive of arts writing by Neil Cooper. Effete No Obstacle.