REDCAT: “Pinochet Porn is undoubtedly the defining achievement of Cantor’s career.” —Art in America
In person: curators Clara López Menéndez and Lia Gangitano
Using her 2004 series of eighty-two drawings, Circus Lives from Hell, as an unconventional “script,” feminist artist Ellen Cantor (1961–2013) worked on her most ambitious project, Pinochet Porn, for the last five years of her life. Interweaving fragments of the lives of five people variously affected by Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile, the film is both an experimental epic and a “soap opera,” as it explores the tragic and comical relationship between power and sexuality (I want more, Dictator, says the submissive “French maid” played by Cantor herself). Using Super 8mm, archival footage, and animated drawings – and posthumously completed according to her directives by Cantor’s close collaborators – the film is now touring nationally and internationally to major critical acclaim.
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