Detail from the cover of Cancelled Confessions

Claude Cahun at the Electric Palace

This Sunday (15 December), Susan de Muth is launching a new translation of writings by the remarkable surrealist Claude Cahun with readings and a special film screening at the Electric Palace. Erica Smith looks forward to finding out more about a woman who was challenging gender norms through her art a century ago.

Collage reproduced in Cancelled Confessions

Cancelled Confessions or Disavowals is the English title of the beautiful 256-page book published by Thin Man Press. The original title is Aveux non Avenus. It was written and illustrated by Cahun in the 1920s and published in 1930. This new edition is the first time the work has been available in English for twenty years.

De Muth has edited and translated the collection. She says, “Aveux non Avenus is considered to be Claude Cahun’s masterpiece. Published in 1930 it defied description (it still does) and also showcased the incredible photomontages that Cahun and her lifelong partner, Marcel Moore, created together. These collected writings reveal Cahun to be a major surrealist writer and pioneering queer theorist almost a century ahead of her time.”

“The re-appearance of this glittering and dissenting semi-lost epic is a gift… Cahun’s writing is stylish, playful and prescient, peopled with angel slang, flowering disavowals, God’s lipstick and an infinite layering of masks.”
Daisy Lafarge, author

Who was Claude Cahun?

In 1930, Claude Cahun (born in 1894 as Lucy Renee Mathilde Schwob) and her partner, artist Marcel Moore (born in 1892 as Suzanne Malherbe) published their surrealist masterpiece, Aveux non Avenus.

Cahun and Moore’s appeal is wide and universal. They were adventurers in life as in art. Cahun famously terrified Andre Breton in the 1920s when she appeared in a Paris café with her head shaved and painted gold.

Having moved to Jersey in 1938, Cahun and Moore waged a mischievous two-person resistance campaign against the occupying Nazi forces from 1940. Finally caught and imprisoned in 1944, they were sentenced to death in 1945, saved at the very last moment by the armistice.

When, Aveux non Avenus was originally published, it baffled all but a few of Cahun’s friends and admirers, leading Cahun to describe herself as, ‘An unwanted Cassandra’. Now, however, is the time of the remarkably prescient Cahun and Moore.

“It’s a surrealist, trans, queer, autofiction, (anti)memoir, and also none of those things. It’s a text, and a life, felt as connection and at the same time completely singular.”
McKenzie Wark, author

A multi-media Claude Cahun evening

The first half of the launch event at the Electric Palace will comprise of projected photomontages from Cancelled Confessions, while extracts from the book will be read by performance artist Marcia Farquhar. This will be followed by a discussion about Cahun and Moore’s life and work, their contemporary relevance, activism, and place in contemporary LGBTQ+ discourse.

The second part of the evening will be a special screening of the short film Flayed Soul by local filmmaker Nichola Bruce, followed by full length screening of Magic Mirror by Sarah Pucill which combines a re-staging of the French Surrealist artist Claude Cahun’s black and white photographs with selected extracts from Aveux non avenus. In Surrealist kaleidoscopic fashion the film creates a weave between image and word, exploring the links between Cahun’s photographs and writing as well as between those of the films of Sarah Pucill, as both artists share similar iconography and concerns.

A Claude Cahun evening will be at the Electric Palace in the High Street, Old Town at 6pm on Sunday 15 December. Tickets are £12. You can find out more about the event and book tickets by following this link.
You can buy a copy of the book at the event, or order one direct via the Thin Man Press website.

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