The eight offset lithograph diptychs of Dean’s Antigone (offset), 2021, are stills from her 2018 double projection 35mm Cinemascope film Antigone. The starting point for the project was Antigone, not only a central figure of mythology but also the name of Dean’s older sister and therefore closely related to the artist’s own story.

In Antigone, Dean creates a multi-layered visual tale around the concept of blindness, rooted in the destiny of Antigone’s father/brother Oedipus, who blinds himself after unwittingly killing his father and marrying his own mother. Dean’s Antigone is concerned with the untold story of the years between the two Sophoclean plays Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus when the blind man arrives at Colonus accompanied by Antigone, who has guided him through years of restless wandering in the wilderness. The film is structured around a solar eclipse as a symbol of nature’s blindness and features writer and poet Anne Carson and actor Stephen Dillane, performing the blinded Oedipus.

Significant is also the artists own blindness in the process. On one hand by using analogue film, on the other hand through the aperture gate masking technique first developed by Dean for FILM, 2011, her project at Tate’s Turbine Hall. The process of masking, and the multiple layers of exposure, meant that Dean was unable to see what she had filmed until 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.’