In Claude Cahun’s most famous photograph, she’s shown wearing a striking, chessboard-checked coat. Her hair cropped androgynously short, Cahun is pressed up close against a mirror but turns her head to gaze levelly out at you with a look that’s both archly defiant and just a little wistful. It’s the sort of severe, sexually ambiguous pose that nowadays gets adopted by fashion models in style magazines – which makes it all the more astonishing that this arresting image actually dates from 1928.
The other 16 photographs by Cahun displayed here are equally groundbreaking, sometimes even shocking. Spanning a 30-year period, these small black-and-white images capture an ominous, dreamlike world of make-believe in which the artist portrays herself in a variety of different roles: a limp body stuffed into a sideboard shelf; a creepy, face-painted doll figure; a statuesque, wind-wracked ancient. As a prominent lesbian associated with Surrealism, and a French-born Jew based in Nazi-occupied Jersey, it’s no wonder that Cahun was drawn to themes of identity and gender, constantly using her work to explore notions of masquerade and the malleability of self. And there’s also a kind of role-play in this exhibition, when you suddenly realise that several images that echo the look and ethos of Cahun’s work are actually pieces by Sarah Pucill, a contemporary British artist.
The main film, ‘Magic Mirror’, is also by Pucill. Part homage to Cahun’s life and work, part meditation on homosexual desire, the piece comes across as a sort of immersive, cinematic poem, taking Cahun’s photographic tableaux and extrapolating them into moving images, while folding in other strange, shadowy imagery and bits of quoted texts. Sometimes, the matching up of visuals with Cahun’s narrated writing does feel a tad programmatic or literal. But overall, the film’s atmosphere of artifice and its celebration of transformation are nicely done.
Gabriel Coxhead