Exhibitions / Still Life / Prisoner Pair - text by Tacita Dean

In Prisoner Pair, Tacita Dean looks with maniacal attentiveness at the details and imperfections of a piece of fruit grown inside a bottle for schnapps.

For a long time, I have had a lingering desire to film pears growing inside bottles and then watch them be picked from the trees - bottles as fruit and fruit as bottles. It is perhaps a strange fancy, come from the childhood thrill of getting something big into a space that’s too small and defying the impossible. I learnt about the pears when I hinged my first boat’s rigging and squeezed it down a bottleneck. But as with the ship in a bottle, growing the pears inside is a dying art and most people don’t bother with it anymore. Interestingly enough, for both the pear and the boat, the manner in which you cheat is the same.

It is the French and the Germans who favour doing this in the production of their eau de vie or schnapps. And it is a particular speciality of the contested land of Alsace. So when in August, it transpired that I had missed the harvest, I went instead and found two imprisoned pears, already picked and preserved in alcohol: one was from France and the other Alsatian. Then I placed them side by side, as doppelgänger, in dialogue, intimacy and confrontation. 

Chance, chaos and contingency are my working allies and I have learnt to welcome the uninvited and to allow the unimaginable. Cheek by cheek, and rump to croup, the prisoners transformed. They became their inner world, a landscape of microscopic detail and activity. And as the sun sunk low, the Alsatian inverted its backdrop into a Caspar David synthesis of interior beauty, like a bid for nationhood, before darkness came and turned them ordinary.


Text by Tacita Dean