Glyptotek, a museum in Copenhagen, Denmark, will feature Tacita Dean’s 35mm double Cinemascope film work Antigone, 2018. The work is based on the name of the artist’s older sister, which references the Greek tragedian Sophocles’s Antigone from 440 BCE.  Dean invited Canadian poet Anne Carson to read her poem TV Men: Antigone (Scripts 1 and 2) repeatedly throughout the film, which she discovered was also inspired by the gap between the Sophoclean plays. She asked actor Stephen Dillane to ‘dress up’ as Oedipus. Antigone met with international acclaim when it opened at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 2018 as part of three major exhibitions across the city dedicated to the work of the artist. Antigone is particularly apposite for the Glyptotek, where it will be presented in the context of the museum’s collection of antiquities, which include a portrait of Sophocles himself and a relief by Theoblad Stein from the 1800s showing the blind King Oedipus in Colonus with his daughters Antigone and Ismene. And while the collections give a certain depth to Antigone, Dean’s film work also put new light on the collections: how are the tales of the Antiquity relevant today?

The exhibition opens to the public on Thursday 21st November, when Tacita Dean will be in conversation about the work with Museum Director and curator of the exhibition, Christine Buhl Andersen.