The Surreal Body as Theatre of the Mind: Women, Surrealism and Contemporary Visual Culture.

This free two-day online symposium features research and reflections by Australian and international art historians, curators and artists on the legacy of surrealism in contemporary visual culture. Speakers particularly foreground how women creatives, working across image-based practices, mobilise surrealist-inflected, body-focused strategies to articulate female and queer subjectivities, embodied experience, and alternative modes of seeing, feeling, and being in the world. Registration available here: https://www.thesurrealbodysymposium.com/

Wednesday 30 September – Thursday 1 October 2026 (Australian Eastern Standard Time AEST (UTC+10)

The Symposium is organised by:
Dr Victoria Souliman, Lecturer in French and Francophone Studies, The University of Sydney
Dr Mimi Kelly, Lecturer in Art History and Curatorship, The University of Melbourne. mimikelly.com
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PROGRAMME:

Day 1 – Wednesday 30 September 4:00-11:00 pm AEDT (UTC+10)

4:00-4:10 pm | Welcome and Opening Remarks

4:10-6:15 pm | Panel 1 (includes a 5-min break halfway) - Fragmented Bodies, Mediated Images: Surrealism in Film and Collage
Moderator: Beth Kearney
● Marie-Pierre Burquier | Université Paris Cité, France
Alchemical Reanimations: Stacey Steers’ Surrealist Recompositions
● Jaime Tsai | National Art School, Sydney, Australia
Lip: Surrealist Strategies in Australian Women’s Video Art
● Linda Alpermann | Dresden State Art Collections, Germany
Beyond the Canvas: Surrealist Legacies in the Work of Christine Schlegel
● Kiki Loveday | Artist, Australia and Susan Potter | University of Sydney, Australia
Traffic in Kisses: An exquisite experiment

6:15-6:30 pm | Break

6:30-7:30 pm | Artists Roundtable
Jaime Tsai in conversation with Tara Marynowsky, and Mimi Kelly with Jane Burton

7:30-7:45 pm | Break

7:45-9:15 pm | Panel 2 - The Commodification of the Body: Surrealism, Fashion, and Visual Culture
Moderator: Victoria Souliman
● Irene Calvi | University of Bologna, Italy
An Eye, a Lip, a Leg: Surrealist Dismemberment and the Visual Language of Fashion
● Louisiane Mailly | University of Bristol, United Kingdom
Consuming Surrealism: Food, Advertising, and Feminine Subversion
● Paula Muhr | Brand University of Applied Sciences, Germany
Double Flowers: Reinterpreting Medical Photographs of Hysteria Through Symbolic Displacement

9:15-9:30 pm | Break

9:30-11:00 pm | Panel 3 - Monstrous-Feminine and Sculptural Bodies
Moderator: Cristina Moraru
● Martina Genetti | Vienna Museum, Austria
Return to the Dark: The Monstrous-Feminine as Pure Aesthetics in Contemporary Visceral Sculpture
● Sara Damiani | University of Bergamo, Italy
The New Exquisite Corpses of Contemporary Women Artists: Hybrid Bodies and Social Claims
● Hugh Magnus | University of Melbourne, Australia
To See the Shadow You Have Become: Heather B. Swann’s “Performance Tools”

11:00-11:05 pm | Closing Day 1

Day 2 — Thursday 1 October 4:00-10:30 pm

4:00-4:10 pm | Welcome Back

4:10-5:45 pm | Panel 4 (includes a 5-min break halfway) - Ecologies of the Surreal Body: Hybridity, Care, and More-than-Human Relations
Moderator: Irene Calvi
● Cristina Moraru | George Enescu National University of Arts, Iași, Romania
Monstrous Intimacies: Ecology, Crisis, and Surrealist Feminist Visualities
● Christina Haupt | University of Passau, Germany
Care, Ecological Kinship and Hybridity in Patricia Piccinini’s More-than-Human Art
● Corey Ratch | University of Tübingen, Germany
Inter-Precarity: Hybrid Bodies, Queer Materialism, and the Surrealist Legacy from Leonor Fini to Wangechi Mutu
● Tor Scott | National Galleries of Scotland, United Kingdom
Edith Rimmington, Ecofeminism and Surrealism: Resonances Today

5:45-6:00 pm | Break

6:00-7:00 pm | Keynote Address
The Haunted House as Theatre of the Mind: The Unravelling Self in the Horror Films Relic
(2020) And Hereditary (2018)
Associate Professor Victoria Carruthers | Australian Catholic University, Australia

7:00-7:15 pm | Break

7:15-8:45 pm | Panel 5 - Bodies of Resistance: Dissidence, Gender, and Political Surrealism
Moderator: Paula Muhr
● Ewa Giezek | École du Louvre and Jean Monnet University, Saint-Étienne, France
Surrealist Legacies in the Representations of Masculinities in the Fight Censorship Group
● Rex Butler | Monash University, Australia and ADS Donaldson | Artist, curator and art historian, Australia
Mary Low: The Militant Surrealist Woman’s Body
● Lena Appel | Free University of Berlin, Germany
Embodied Estrangements: Dissident Surrealism and the Collaged Body in Sylvia Palacios Whitman’s Cup and Tail (1977/78)

8:45-9:00 pm | Break

9:00-10:30 pm | Panel 6 - Digital Dreams and Surreal Bodies
Moderator: Mimi Kelly
● Holly Durant | RMIT University, Australia
Alien Kinaesthesia: Surrealist Defamiliarisation and the Femme Performing Body
● Milly Kynaston | University of Sydney, Australia
Desire.exe: Cyberfeminism and the Legacies of Surrealist Photography in Mindy Seu's A Sexual History of the Internet
● Angelique Joy | RMIT University, Australia
Do cyborgs dream of digital penes? Freud, Firestone and the cyborg (We Perform)

10:30-10:45 pm | Closing Remarks