With HOTEL KALIFORNIA, a special reading and performance by Karl Holmqvist.

A history of the world as it has become known to me is concerned with, and a document of Ellen Cantor’s work through the lens of Pinochet Porn (2008–16) and its making – an epic experimental film embodying, and radically extending her multifaceted artistic practice. Taking the form of an episodic narrative about five children growing up under the regime of General Augusto Pinochet in Chile, and shot between her dual hometowns of London and New York, history is observed through Cantor’s fictive speculations on private experience within a totalising political order. 

A history of the world as it has become known to me brings together writings and archival materials of Cantor including a reproduction in full of her drawing-based script Circus Lives from Hell (2004), alongside contributions by writers, artists, collaborators and friends reflecting on Cantor’s practice, Pinochet Porn and a singularly transgressive vision: explicitly feminist, remorselessly emotional, dramatic in tone, and, as Cantor herself liked to put it, adult in subject matter.

Editors: Lia Gangitano, Fatima Hellberg and Jamie Stevens
Contributors: Dodie Bellamy, Jonathan Berger, John Brattin, Ellen Cantor, Lia Gangitano, Cy Gavin, Jospeh Grigely, Clara López Menéndez and John Maybury.
Publisher: Sternberg Press, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts and Participant Inc.
Design: Pedro Cid Proença
Copyediting: Ben Caton
Translation: Robert Schlicht
Copyediting, German: Gitte Lindmaier
Price: 26 EUR
, to order the book, please email info@kuenstlerhaus.de

Karl Holmqvist, artist, poet and friend of Cantor will be reading HOTEL KALIFORNIA, a piece of special importance and connection – “Give it more heart and more nuance…”

The full launch programme includes upcoming events at Participant Inc, New York and Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin.