Creation and Decreation in Tacita Dean's Antigone

Abstract “Creation and Decreation in Tacita Dean's Antigone” explores Dean's major film of 2018, Antigone, in relation to themes of world-making and “decreation.” Situating Antigone as a companion piece to Dean's Event for a Stage (2015), the essay also examines the theme of solar eclipse in the work in relation to the artist's wider oeuvre in terms of a career-long pursuit of the sun and her development of a photological aesthetics. Through examination of treatments of the Antigone material in the work of authors including George Steiner, Anne Carson, Judith Butler, and Virginia Woolf, the essay explores the political significance of the Antigone myth in terms of the individual's relationship to others and to the state, as well as to arguments concerning queer kinship structures, and shows the ways in which Dean develops these implications in her film.