The hour-long 35mm anamorphic film Antigone (2018) is the most complex work to date by British-European artist Tacita Dean. 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. But Antigone 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. Dean found the ally for her ambitious project in her medium: for the film she reached deep into the bag of tricks from the early days of cinema, when it was still considered futuristic and enchanted the audience with illusions. To do this, she brought techniques such as masking and multiple exposures out of the sleep of oblivion and adapted them to her specific ideas. Dean left the "seeing part" to the camera, that magical one-eyed box, sending herself into the unpredictable. Antigone is 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 Laurenz Foundation also "blindly" got involved in the venture and has accompanied the film from the very beginning. The narrative of the making and impact of this work is illustrated in the book by means of numerous images - production shots, still photographs, drawings by the artist, etc. - and texts. In an essay, Dean recounts her fascination with the name and the character. The transcript of the words spoken in the film complements the artist's book. Antigone belongs to the collection of the Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation and is presented for the first time in Switzerland at Kunstmuseum Basel | Gegenwart.
