Ellen Cantor 05
Ellen Cantor, Pinochet Porn, Super-8, screenshot, 2008-16. Courtesy Ellen Cantor Estate

CCA Clubroom, Glasgow, Monday 9 December at 6.30pm. To reserve your place or find out more, click here.

Join us for our final session when we revisit, read and discuss, ‘Pinochet Porn in Progress’ by Ellen Cantor, an American artist who combined pop culture, pornography, sexuality and politics into a practice that included film, painting, drawing and writing. Published by MAP in 2009, the article sketches out the narrative beginnings of the artist’s the epic Super-8 project Pinochet Porn in 2008.

Pinochet Porn has a soap opera-like narrative, at once tragic and comedic. Its story weaves between personal, political, and historical circumstances, obliquely revolving around the political discord in Chile during the regime of General Augusto Pinochet. Following her death in 2013, the film was completed in 2016 by friends. The cast and crew, and by extension the film itself, have become a document of an extended moment in New York and London avant-garde art and culture.

How does the act of appropriating gender relations engendered in an imaginary Chile, a Latin American country with a history of dictatorial oppression, reflect on the western avant-garde? What were the political implications then and what is their legacy ten years later?

Penetrate: Translate reading group is led and has been devised by Glasgow-based Mexican artist Catalina Barroso-Luque.