Presentation Sisters

I watched Tacita Dean’s Presentation Sisters, 2005 for the first time in 2018. Installed with a flanking hallway at MOCA, I turned the corner into the viewing room, to that blanket of warm sound that an old projector makes. There was a couch to sit on, and the film was (surprising in an artworld phobic of religion) about a convent.

The film's locations -- a series of rooms, gardens, and grounds -- would have been evident as a convent had not one nun ever appeared. I have known many convents. There is a collective sparseness to the décor. Rooms have the look of loving wear and use, as though a dish could live for decades without the threat of accident.

I wanted to write about the film, but I dared not tread on its silence at the time. I thought of the nuns I have met, some who I have known very well and some I have known briefly. My memory and biography flowed into Dean’s film and tried to connect with the images. Sometimes the scenes transported me into a specific memory, other times the nuns themselves morphed into someone I had suddenly remembered.

Presentations Sisters had a powerful hold on me. I watched the whole film at MOCA that day. I enjoyed being transported; I love when memory re-animates parts of me that I assumed had faded forever.

I was drawn to a particular sister preparing herself a bowl of cereal. She gently shakes a handful of flakes in a bowl followed by modest drop of milk. I have met boisterous nuns and incredibly shy nuns, yet personality has very little to do with their power. Instead, it is more about collective, historical accumulations, of small, modest moves gaining momentum. The mere image of breakfast handled with grace, as opposed to hurried necessity that I am typically pursuing, was fascinating, as though I was looking at another possible world. 

A month ago, on my computer, I watched Presentation Sisters again on an afternoon in quarantine and immediately I wanted to write about the film again. The film had moved in my mind: Dean’s fixed shots of the interior of the convent told a different story this time. 

The convent wasn’t as intimate as before. Instead, I noticed the emptiness of the large spaces that Dean was recording. The small grouping of nuns – among the last of their order founded in Cork, Ireland by Nano Nagle in the 18th century with the charism of educating poor girls -- was living on a sprawling campus that was obviously once full. The rituals were the same – Dean shows us the rhythms of daily life, prayer, work, and leisure – yet, now, I noticed empty dressers occupying hallways, as though they are ready to be taken out my movers.  

The sisters moved in and out of the frame as though they are well behaved guests. They do not assert themselves in their environment, they are stewards of it. They do not want to leave their mark forever; they do not hang of photos of themselves or craft the spaces for a personal touch. Simply put, they are focused on other things. They seem ready to vanish. They seem like they are already vanishing. Dean’s shots reminded me of the vision of a child who has not yet achieved object permanence: when the nuns leave the shots, they could be gone forever, and you know what, that is true.

I used to know more people like this, now all I seem to encounter are walking megaphones, conduits of constant personality assertion. Switching over from the computer window where Dean’s film quietly played over to Twitter and Instagram and the likes, was like stepping out of a dark silent space, where I watched those who do not have the look of people who are looked at, in the maw of noise and narcissism.   

And now this morning, I replayed Presentation Sisters in my mind. I did not watch it again, just merely tried to think of as much of it as I could, the ethic of Dean's camera, that light pouring in from the background, drenching the dark foregrounds in streams of brightness. If I saw this same shot in a Hollywood film, I would think of salvation.

This time I thought of that scene where the sisters are watching a soccer match. As with all dialogue in the film, you cannot really make out what they are saying. The nuns seem in an adjacent but different dimension; I can hear their hum, even feel their warmth, from the other side of a wall. They are sitting up straight. The match is exciting, and they are excited, yet they make no big movements, no gestures of arms thrusting in the air or exclamation. This is leisure, but leisure as a ritual, as something that has been deemed necessary for a balanced day.

The three times I have wanted to write about the Presentation Sisters, I have been pulled between feeling remote and intimate, full and empty, able to cling to life and somehow feeling as though I could open my hand and let it slip from me. While the first encounter with the film was on a casual afternoon, when I was unaware of the film’s existence and that I would soon be pulled into a tunnel of memory, the second and third encounters have been during quarantine, at various stages.

The environment around me closed gradually for about a week and now has been closed for months. The experience has been one of slowly realizing what is occurring, slowly watching intimacy and physical contact with other recede and go away.

Now, the city is empty, while the small spaces that I occupy have becoming a hive of significance and ritual. I have lost contact with everything outside of a mile-wide circumference, yet everything inside of my house has started to have the look of those un-dropped and well used dishes.

Yes, the fright remains. The fear that all of this could escalate remains. I still feel afraid, uncertain of what is going to happen next, especially as tensions continue to rise and people are getting sick of being sick. We will fill the world again, but we are not going to be capable of our full arrogance for a long time.

Yes, I think of those dark spaces in the convent, lit by single points of light, free of boasting. And I think of those interiors, in which people move in and out, remaining as they are when the people leave the frame.