Book Launch: Cancelled Confessions or Disavowals by Claude Cahun - Camden Art Centre

with Marcia Farquhar, Juliet Jacques and Susan de Muth

Cancelled Confessions is a rediscovered masterpiece by surrealist writer and queer theorist Claude Cahun, published in English for the first time in twenty years. Described as “a glittering and dissenting semi-lost epic,” this profound text explores themes of identity, art, and resistance. Accompanied by dreamlike photomontages, it offers a kaleidoscope of fragments, including philosophical musings, letters, and fables.

To mark the launch of this work, please join us for an engaging discussion of this visionary work with Marcia Farquhar, Juliet Jacques, and Susan de Muth, which continues to resonate in today’s queer and surrealist discourses.

Organised in collaboration with Thin Man Press.

About the book Speakers

About the book

Cancelled Confessions reveals Claude 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,’ writes Daisy Lafarge, author.

In 1930, Claude Cahun (born Lucy Schwob) and her partner, artist Marcel Moore (born Suzanne Malherbe), published their surrealist masterpiece, Aveux non Avenus, translated here as Cancelled Confessions and available in English for the first time in twenty years.

Susan de Muth’s revised translation of Cancelled Confessions includes a new introduction by art historian Amelia Groom, which contextualises it within contemporary queer discourse.

‘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,’ says McKenzie Wark, author.

‘The kaleidoscopic text is pieced together from diverse fragments… there are philosophical and subversive theological musings, aphorisms and fables, letters and dialogues, dreams and hymns, nightmares and jokes,’ writes Groom.

The book’s nine sections are prefaced by dreamlike photomontages (reproduced in high definition here), which reflect, illuminate, and converse with the verbal content. Upon publication, Aveux non Avenus simply 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.

‘Cahun was a pioneer of gender-bending role-playing… eerily ahead of her time. She has attracted an almost cult-like following,’ remarked the late David Bowie.

Cahun and Moore’s appeal is wide and universal. They were adventurers in life as in art. Cahun famously terrified André 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.

Speakers

Marcia Farquhar is known for her work in performance, installation, object making and sound works. Her site-specific events have been staged and exhibited internationally in museums and galleries, as well as in kitchen showrooms, pubs, parks and leisure centres. In 2021 she published a fragmented memoir, Pushing 60. Marcia is also part of the Stories in Transit team, established by Marina Warner, working with refugees and the host community of Palermo. In September this year she performed at the International Performance Art Giswil 2024.

Juliet Jacques (b. 1981) is a writer and filmmaker based in London. She has published six books, including Trans: A Memoir (2015), Variations (2021) and The Woman in the Portrait (2024). Her fiction, journalism and essays have appeared in numerous publications, and her short films have screened across the world. She teaches at the Royal College of Art and co-hosts Novara FM.

Susan de Muth is the translator of Claude Cahun’s Aveux non-Avenus [Cancelled Confessions] and many other DaDa and surrealist texts. She lives in London.