“I’ll never finish taking off all these masks,” wrote Claude Cahun in 1930. The performative self-portrait, and the filmic and photographic investigation into the “masquerade of femininity” which often accompanies it, is a theme that runs through artists’ oeuvres from that of Cahun and Maya Deren to Cindy Sherman. Indeed, while Cahun was writing poems and photographing herself wearing masks in Paris, former Bauhaus student Gertrud Arndt was also addressing the façade of…
read more »