A Forerunner in contemporary performance, Cahun uses her own body as the centre of her reflections as her identity. Through the camera, the artist draws frames with auto reflexive and destabilizing vocation. Like the frame of a mirror, a theatre scene or the limits a pupil, the images -poetic, dramatic, ironic and disturbing- return a infinity of possible to be forms, more or less distorted, ambivalent, comic or subversive, and always irrevocably, denatured.
With the naked skull, sharp profile and a severe look, the writer, photographer and performer, challenges from her inner depth the truth and conventions that could dress her in a an homonymic and constant form. Her work, as reflected in the exhibition, intimidates through its frankness regarding empty answers and questioning who we are.
Unique and numerous, whole and fragmented, with an infinity of ways in which you can interpret it, and in which ways it can be viewed. Claude Cahun always consulted Suzanne Malherbe - known as Marcel Moore-, her intimate partner, artist collaborator and life long representative. Besides self-portraits, Cahun portrayed small household objects, trinkets as well as photomontages, in an innovative form through her work. Linked to Surrealism, in Paris, between the wars she maintained close friendships with intellectuals and avant-garde artists as well as holding an important role in the resistance against the Nazi occupation, in which enhances the political dimension of her work. Anti-conventionalist, sensitive to the extreme, her production continues to offer a strong potential interpretive with a disquieting aesthetic impact.
Bárbara Muriel
