Documenting Tacita Dean’s new film work on the many resonances of Sophocles’ drama

Tacita Dean’s (born 1965) Antigone (2018) is an hour-long 35mm anamorphic film, and is the most complex work to date by the British-European artist. The name of this work combines the artist’s personal history with the mythological world order: Antigone is the heroine in the eponymous drama by the Greek poet Sophocles, and is also the name of Tacita Dean’s older sister. The name creates a double bond full of ambivalences and is the reason for Dean’s exploration of the character.

The leitmotif of the work is blindness: Antigone revolves around fundamental questions of foresight and destiny, seeing and not seeing, and metaphorical blindness as a necessity for artistic work. It is also a thoroughly analogue work: Dean assembled the film images, which appear like collages, with and inside the camera using sophisticated stencils and multiple exposures. The result of this experimental project is both a pioneering achievement and a masterpiece. The book documents the narrative of the making and impact of this work.