Centrespace, VRC, DCA 

Fiona Banner ‘Don’t Look Back’

Open: 29 Aug – 21st Sept, Mon-Fri 09.30-20.30 Sat 09.30-16.30

Location: Centrespace, VRC, Dundee Contemporary Arts 

Don’t look Back is the title of DA Pennebaker’s legendary documentary
of Bob Dylan’s brilliant 1965 British tour, the film was made the next year,
the year Fiona Banner was born. Don’t Look Back is often cited as the first
ever rockumentary, it is also a formative mythologisation of Dylan,
teetering on the brink of the invention of rock.

Fiona Banner’s Don’t Look Back constitutes three attempts to describe
Penne- baker’s documentary in its entirety. Although the texts describe
the same film they are each slightly different, three different moments.
The presence of these descriptions undermines this notion of an
objective entirety, the texts are subject to the laws of memory – no two
performances are the same. There is no definitive description,
no definitive memory.

The work takes the form of large silk-screen prints (260 x 230cm each),
installed in the same space. The posters could be three stages.
The viewer is simultaneously the audience, staring up at the stage,
and the performer confronted by a vast field of letters looking out of the
print like a crowd of spectators.

For us in the Visual Research Centre (VRC) at the University of Dundee
Fiona Banner’s publication Don’t Look Back was a landmark project.
It was our first collaboration in a new facility located in the Dundee
Contemporary Arts (DCA) building, which had itself just opened.
Prior to the opening we had discussed Don’t Look Back with Nicolas
Serota on his visit to DCA. He had recently featured Fiona in the Art Now
room at Tate Britain and later purchased Don’t Look Back for the
Tate collection.

It is a wonderful and appropriate opportunity for us, in the context of
Impact 8, to show this work for the first time in Scotland – in the building
where it was created.