Antigone (offset)

Antigone (offset), 2021 is a set of prints by Tacita Dean, who selected stills from her double 35mm Cinemascope film work Antigone, 2018 and printed them as 8 pairs of offset lithographs.

Antigone, a central figure of mythology, is also the name of Dean’s older sister and therefore closely related to the artist’s own story and probably one of the first words the artist ever learnt. In the film Antigone, Dean created a visual tale around the concept of blindness rooted in the destiny of Antigone’s father/brother Oedipus, the king of Thebes, who blinds himself after unwittingly killing his father and marrying his own mother Jocasta.
Oedipus’s self-imposed punishment ends the first play in the Sophoclean Theban trilogy, Oedipus Rex, when Oedipus banishes himself from Thebes. At the beginning of the second play, Oedipus at Colonus, the blind man arrives at Colonus accompanied by his daughter Antigone, who has guided him through years of restless wandering in the wilderness.

Dean’s Antigone is concerned with the intervening years between the two plays. The film is structured around a solar eclipse and features writer and poet Anne Carson and actor Stephen Dillane. The latter, performs the role of the blinded Oedipus by wearing eclipse glasses. Anne Carson recites her poem TV Men: Antigone (Scripts 1 and 2) about the same gap between the plays.
Like eyes, the offset lithographs are paired as diptychs, replicating the double projection in Antigone. The film was created through a process of masking, and multiple layers of exposure, which meant that Dean was unable to see what she had filmed until she printed the negative months after she began:

“So Antigone was instructed by blindness: my own creative blindness, the blindness of Oedipus and the cosmic blindness found in nature in the form of the total eclipse of the sun. But most especially Antigone has taken form as a result of the inherent blindness of film. Using masking inside the camera’s aperture gate, I filmed one part of the film frame before rewinding the camera to film another part. This meant that the film was composed without the possibility of seeing what was already exposed in the frame.”

–Tacita Dean