The Surreal Body as Theatre of the Mind:
Women, Surrealism and Contemporary Visual Culture
Abstracts & Speaker Bios
Day One: Wednesday, 30 September
4.00 - 11.00 pm AEST (UTC + 10)
PANEL 1
Fragmented Bodies, Mediated Images:
Surrealism in Film and Collage
Moderator: Beth Kearney | Beth (she/her) is Lecturer in French and Francophone Studies at the University of Queensland, Australia. Her research focuses broadly on francophone literature and visual cultures (20th-21st centuries); gender studies; global feminisms; and decolonial and transnational theory. Her first book, Unfixing the Self in Contemporary Women's Phototexts of the Francophone World, is forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press.
Alchemical Reanimations: Stacey Steers' Surrealist Recompositions
Marie-Pierre Burquier | Université Paris Cité, France
Abstract: Working from excerpts of 1920s Hollywood films featuring Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford and Janet Gaynor, American artist Stacey Steers creates meticulously handcrafted animated collages that dismantle patriarchal cinematic temporality and reanimate feminine figures within dense, oneiric and distinctly worlds devoid of masculine presences.
Drawing on surrealist principles of free association, metamorphosis and poetic juxtaposition, her short films Night Hunter (2011) and Edge of Alchemy (2017) unfold as alchemical laboratories in which fragments of early twentieth-century cinema are cut, layered, sutured and set into motion. Rather than fetishising the female star, Steers reverses the inherited structures of the male gaze, granting these actresses renewed agency within proliferating, organic assemblages. Recomposed as hybrid beings – at times flowers or bird-women – Gish, Gaynor and Pickford re-emerge as powerful presences who command their own gestures, transformations and desires.
This paper argues that Steers mobilises surrealism as a feminist methodology. In her practice, fragmentation becomes a mode of recomposition, temporal rupture unsettles linear, patriarchal narrative time, while the use of colour destabilises bodily boundaries. Through artisanal animation techniques, she constructs an alternative mythology of Hollywood in which silent-era actresses appear no longer as fetishes or victims, but as self-determining subjects capable of rewriting the history of classical cinema. The installations Steers designs to present her film-collages (miniature gothic houses and steampunk optical instruments) further displace voyeuristic spectatorship, relocating these feminine figures within intimate, protective and participatory environments. By focusing on bodily metamorphosis and the dismantling of early Hollywood iconography at stake in these contemporary works, this paper aims to situate Steers’ practice within a feminist afterlife of surrealism, one that generates alternative subjectivities and new modes of seeing.
Bio: Marie-Pierre Burquier holds a PhD in Visual Studies from Université Paris Cité, where she is currently an associate researcher. Her dissertation focuses on the reuse of classical Hollywood cinema in contemporary experimental film. She has published articles in several journals, including Théorème, Transatlantica and Hors-Champ, as well as book chapters in Penser le verre, La création au tournant de la transparence, and Corps béants, corps morcelés dans les arts scéniques et visuels. She is an associate editor of Found Footage Magazine and regularly organises experimental film screenings in Paris and the United States. She currently teaches in San Francisco.
Lip: Surrealist Strategies in Australian Women’s Video Art
Jaime Tsai | National Art School, Sydney, Australia
Abstract: This paper explores how the transformative cutting practices of surrealist collage and cinema are expanded by contemporary Australian women’s video art. Collage adopts an existing visual language and transforms its original meaning, using deliberately jarring imagery or techniques that draw attention to the artist’s manipulation. Classical Hollywood cinema of the twentieth century tended to produce seamless illusions of the social and cultural hegemony that the Surrealists reviled. Like early surrealist cinema, Australian video at the turn of the century was inflected by the dominance of the North American film industry. As early as the 1970s, Australian artists recognised the radical cut and paste potential of video as a low-fi, accessible, dematerialised, and reproducible medium suited to subverting Hollywood paradigms. Tara Marynowsky, Soda Jerk, and Tracey Moffatt use analogue and digital piracy to make the language of Hollywood cut against itself. I will argue that their various forms of cutting, the ‘slash’, the ‘haunt’, and the ‘cutaway’, are both strategy and metaphor in videos that feature women’s bodies. Tara Marynowsky’s Coming Attractions (2017-2019) slash Hollywood’s ideal female bodies, rendering them monstrous. Soda Jerk’s Séance Fictions (2005-2012) feature deceased Hollywood film stars haunted by the spectres of their ageing selves. Tracey Moffatt’s Lip (2000) inverts embodied hierarchies by foregrounding cutaways of marginal figures, such as black cooks and housekeepers, talking back to white women. By using Surrealist collage tactics, Marynowsky, Soda Jerk, and Moffatt also exemplify their liberatory spirit with incisive critique and playful world building.
Bio: Dr Jaime Tsai is lecturer in Art History and Theory at the National Art School, Sydney, and an independent curator of contemporary Australian art. Her research traces the legacies of Dada and Surrealism in contemporary Australian art. She has contributed to The International Encyclopedia of Surrealism and The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Visual Culture (forthcoming), and her recent publications include “Surrealism, Counter-Mapping and Covid: Confluences in Contemporary Asian Australian Art” with Victoria Carruthers in the International Journal of Surrealism (University of Minnesota Press, 2024) and “The Subterranean Modernism of Marcel Duchamp and Georges Bataille” in Duchamp Accelerated (Bloomsbury, 2024).
Beyond the Canvas: Surrealist Legacies in the Work of Christine Schlegel
Linda Alpermann | Dresden State Art Collections, Germany
Abstract: This paper examines the work of German painter Christine Schlegel (b. 1950) in relation to the legacy of surrealism, focusing on the body as a site where surrealist strategies of fragmentation, layering, displacement, projection, and transformation are articulated across painting, photographic collage, and projection-based works. Although Schlegel is not associated with historical surrealism, her work repeatedly mobilises visual procedures that unsettle bodily coherence and stable forms of representation.
Since the 1970s, Schlegel has worked primarily as a painter while extending painterly thinking into other media. In her paintings, bodies appear layered, distorted, and spatially dislocated, resisting unified representation. Her overpainted photographs and collage pieces destabilise the documentary function of the image, while her manipulated Super-8 films—scratched, painted, and projected onto the moving body of dancer Fine Kwiatkowski—move painterly intervention beyond the canvas and into space, time, and motion. In these performances, the real body becomes a surface of projection, where light, movement, and colour continuously fragment and reconfigure bodily form.
The paper argues that Schlegel develops an artistic practice that reactivates surrealist strategies across painting, photocollage, film, and projection-based performance within the specific historical context of the German Democratic Republic. Rather than operating as overt opposition, however, her work creates an alternative pictorial language that departs from normative modes of bodily representation and opens new ways of visualising the body in relation to inner and outer realities.
Bio: Linda Alpermann is an art historian, early career researcher, and former research trainee at the Dresden State Art Collections. Her research focuses on German modern and contemporary art, feminist art histories, and artistic practices across different media. Her publications include exhibition catalogue essays and journal articles based on curatorial and collection-based research. She co-curated the exhibition Stepping Out of Line: Women Action Artists in the GDR at the Albertinum, Dresden (2025/26). She is currently preparing a PhD project in visual studies and a forthcoming publication examining circus and puppet theatre imagery in the work of the post-Expressionist painter Fritz Winkler (2027).
Traffic in Kisses: An Exquisite Experiment
Kiki Loveday | Artist, Australia
Susan Potter | University of Sydney, Australia
Abstract: We were curious about what would happen if we worked together on a creative assemblage of kiss films, if we attempted to model a lesbian audiovisual and historiographical practice while offering a queer perspective on the aesthetic, social, and disciplinary functions of the erotic genre in the history of early cinema. A popular attraction of early cinema, kiss films are historically important documents of sexual history that point to early film’s intermediality, the traffic in entertainers and entertainments between stage and screen. This historical context of both planned and serendipitous mobility, circulation and exchange was suggestive for how we might creatively investigate this period so as to offer an alternative perspective on its sexuality effects. Reinventing the exquisite corpse methodology associated with the Surrealists, and eschewing any grand narrative of discovery, we aimed to produce a lively encounter between two researchers and their appropriation, citation, and transformation of moving image artefacts. Across a number of months we established a film archive for the project, while also reviewing the scholarly literature. We tested audiovisual methods of exchange and assemblage, and developed a thematic structure for the project. Produced across several weeks by exchanging, responding to, and assembling a series of image and sound sequences, Traffic in Kisses remediates some of the most iconic kiss films produced between 1896 and 1905. Traffic in Kisses is the first of a series of exquisite collaborative experiments.
Bios: Kiki Loveday is an interdisciplinary artist and scholar working at the intersection of feminist and queer historiographies, narrative and the moving image. Their creative work has exhibited in venues from The Coney Island Film Festival in New York City to The Virginia Scott Galleries of American Art at The Huntington in Los Angeles. Her award-winning scholarly work has been published in Feminist Media Histories, Early Popular Visual Culture, The Women Film Pioneers Project, Framework, and is forthcoming in multiple anthologies. S/he cofounded the Women in the Director’s Chair Oral History Project at Tisch/NYU and is currently at work on a monograph on Sappho in silent cinema.
Susan Potter is an award-winning scholar and filmmaker, and Senior Lecturer in the School of Art, Communication and English at The University of Sydney, on Gadigal Country. Across diverse critical, creative and collaborative projects, her research investigates the relation of cinema as modern mass medium to the intensification of sexuality since the late nineteenth century, and audiovisual media’s role in queer identity and culture formation. Susan is also co-director of The Just Archives Collaboratory, which aims to bring together archivists, researchers, artists, educators, and cultural organisers to investigate the politics of care, ethics, and histories of queer and trans archives.
Artists Roundtable
Jaime Tsai in conversation with Tara Marynowsky, and Mimi Kelly with Jane Burton
This will be a relaxed discussion with Australian artists Tara Marynowsky and Jane Burton on the influence of Surrealism on their artworks. Marynowsky works across the media of painting, drawing, and film and incorporates found images into her work. Her art investigates recorded images and the historical representation of women. Burton’s practice incorporates photography, film, and painting. Her art explores memory, longing, mortality and desire and is often darkly ambiguous and enigmatic.
Jaime Tsai (she/her) is an independent curator and Lecturer in Art History and Theory, National Art School, Australia. Mimi Kelly (she/her) is Lecturer in Art History and Curatorship, University of Melbourne, Australia.
PANEL 2
The Commodification of the Body:
Surrealism, Fashion, and Visual Culture
Moderator: Victoria Souliman | Vick (she/her) is a Lecturer in French and Francophone Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. She is the author of Australian Women, Art and the Interwar Years: Migration and Identity (Routledge, 2026), which developed from her doctoral research. Her current research explores female subjectivity and the legacy of surrealism in contemporary visual culture.
An Eye, a Lip, a Leg: Surrealist Dismemberment and the Visual Language of Fashion
Irene Calvi | University of Bologna, Italy
Abstract: Since Surrealism first entered the pages of Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue in the 1930s, the fragmented female body has functioned as one of fashion’s most persistent and productive visual languages. This paper focuses on its interwar origins to the present, arguing that the isolated eye, the severed leg, the disembodied lips that recur across fashion image-making are never simply aesthetic provocation, but rather a structural code through which desire, femininity, and commodification are produced and naturalised. Marshall McLuhan, in The Mechanical Bride (1951), was among the first to detect this condition, but the theoretical backbone is provided by Laura Mulvey’s male gaze (1975) and by Morna Laing’s Picturing the Woman-Child (2021), which demonstrates how Surrealist strategies of bodily dislocation were absorbed into the editorial conventions of the fashion magazine and recirculated across decades. In fact, it is Erwin Blumenfeld’s 1950 Vogue cover - a single eye, a beauty spot, red lips suspended on white - that condenses the Surrealist dismembered gaze into commercial seduction. This contribution aims to address a counter-approach as well, because dismemberment wasn’t an exclusively patriarchal instrument. As Allmer shows (2016) women working across the Dada-Surrealist continuum actively revised the canon from within: from Hannah Höch’s photomontages, Kati Horna’s documentary-surrealist photography, Unica Zürn automatic drawings, to contemporary examples as Wangechi Mutu, whose collages assembled from fashion magazines and medical illustrations redirect fragmentation towards postcolonial critique. In fashion creation this counter-tradition finds its most sustained sartorial expression in Rei Kawakubo’s Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body (1997) and Ann Demeulemeester’s asymmetric refusal of the objectifying gaze and interest in the deconstruction as visible in Corps Humain (SS1998), both returning the distorted body to the wearer’s agency rather than the viewer’s pleasure.
Bio: Irene Calvi is a PhD student in Visual Arts and Fashion Studies at the Department of Arts, University of Bologna, where her research explores the intersection of fashion and museum interpretation, with a focus on the integration of emerging technologies. Actively engaged in fostering international scholarly networks, she serves on the Executive Committee of The Association of Dress Historians and is a Junior Fellow at the International Research Centre CFC – Culture Fashion Communication. She also holds the role of cultrice della materia (teaching assistant) for the course Fashion and Visual Culture in the master’s programme in Fashion Studies at the University of Bologna – Rimini Campus.
Consuming Surrealism: Food, Advertising, and Feminine Subversion
Louisiane Mailly | University of Bristol, United Kingdom
Abstract: In the history of Surrealism, artistic explorations of cuisine have often marginalised women’s voices by relegating cooking to the level of the anecdotal; secondary to other forms of artistic experimentation that were less domestic and therefore masculine coded. Yet today, it is a privileged visual medium in artistic and advertising productions where references to Surrealism (play on scale, unexpected assemblages, and transformations of everyday objects) become aesthetic tools for producing striking images that are easily shareable on social media. In this paper I propose a study of contemporary culinary productions that I consider surrealist in their artistic approach, focusing on the visual production of Laila Gohar. This Egyptian born artist has been using food as an artistic medium integrated into advertising strategies, but also into cultural or promotional events (her collaborators include Prada, Hermès, Comme des Garçons, Simone Rocha, and Sotheby’s). Through hybrid culinary forms, Gohar’s work questions the relationship between creation and consumption. In the second part of this paper, I will present my own research-creation project in which I explore how food can become a medium for collective experimentation. My artistic approach aims to explore how the imaginative potential of dreams and child-like wonder can be incorporated into local everyday life, outside of institutional art spaces and the drive of globalised image production. By bringing together Gohar’s work and my research-creation practice, this paper seeks to understand how surrealist forms related to food circulate today between different spaces: art, advertising, and community practices.
Bio: Louisiane Mailly is a teacher and doctoral researcher of French Literature at the University of Bristol. Her thesis explores the intersection of travel literature and women’s writing, placing the work of avant-garde women artists at the centre of a series of exchanges and reciprocal influences between France and the colonial world.
Double Flowers: Reinterpreting Medical Photographs of Hysteria Through Symbolic Displacement
Paula Muhr | Brand University of Applied Sciences, Germany
Abstract: The talk presents Double Flowers, my ongoing series of photographic and video works that reinterprets late nineteenth-century medical images of a disorder historically called hysteria. The project draws on archival photographs of female patients originally produced to illustrate and stabilise symptom typologies. I rework images appropriated from historical medical books and journals by printing the scans and then juxtaposing them with plants, objects, and dead and living animals, referencing the symbolic codes of Dutch still life painting. Finally, I rephotograph and enlarge these assemblages to an almost life-size scale.
Through this intervention, the fixed medical meaning of these images is estranged and displaced. The work shifts the photographs from clinical documents to portraits, where the added elements function as speculative articulations of subjective states and identities that remained unexpressed or were actively suppressed within the medical framework. The patient’s body appears not as a stable site of knowledge but as a site of unstable and open-ended meanings.
A related video extends this approach. It shows a historical photograph gradually being destroyed by slugs, while a slowed-down synthetic voice reads statements by present-day patients whose symptoms were previously classified as hysteria and are now subsumed under diagnoses such as functional neurological disorder (FND). These accounts foreground ongoing forms of dismissal and silencing of female patients.
The work engages with surrealist strategies of juxtaposition, symbolic displacement, metamorphosis, and abjection to interrogate the historical and contemporary construction of pathological bodies and to explore alternative modes of visualising and articulating marginalised subjectivities.
Bio: Paula Muhr is a Berlin-based visual artist and researcher. She is currently Professor of Transdisciplinary Studies at the Brand University of Applied Sciences Hamburg. She studied visual arts, art history, literary theory, and physics in Novi Sad, Belgrade, and Leipzig, and holds a Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Arts from the University of Fine Arts Leipzig. She received her PhD in Art and Visual History from Humboldt University Berlin (From Photography to fMRI: Epistemic Functions of Images in Medical Research on Hysteria). Through her research-based artistic practice, she examines socio-cultural strategies of constructing sexuality, gender, desire, and normality.
PANEL 3
Monstrous-Feminine and Sculptural Bodies
Moderator: Mimi Kelly | Mimi (she/her) is a Lecturer in Art History and Curatorship at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Her research explores intersections between art, popular culture and feminism, with a focus on performance art and photomedia. She completed her PhD at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney. Her creative website is: mimikelly.com.
Return to the Dark: The Monstrous-Feminine as Pure Aesthetics in Contemporary Visceral Sculpture
Martina Genetti | Vienna Museum, Austria
Abstract: This paper examines the work of South Korean sculptor Mire Lee as a paradigmatic instance of a new aesthetics of horror in contemporary art, a mode of body-focused practice characterised by dissolution, fragmentation, and material transgression. Lee’s kinetic installations, in which silicone, clay, lubricant, and mechanical systems produce leaking, convulsing, organlike forms, dismantle the body as an intact unit, rendering it as radically porous, decaying matter that oscillates between the seductive and the repellent. Situated within a broader constellation of visceral practices, including for example those of Berlinde De Bruyckere, Ivana Bašić, and Doreen Garner, Lee’s work is read here as exemplifying a wider cultural return to the dark, in which the figure of the monster operates as both archaic cthulhian force and posthumanist-dystopian projection.
Drawing on Barbara Creed’s concept of the monstrous-feminine and Julia Kristeva’s theorisation of abjection, the paper proposes that Lee’s sculptures enact a decisive shift: the monstrous-feminine is no longer articulated through figurative motifs such as the witch or the devouring mother, as in the films Creed examined, but operates as abstraction, as pure aesthetics. Lee’s explicit engagement with body horror cinema and her 2021 pairing with H.R. Giger at Berlin’s Schinkel Pavillon underscore this cinematic lineage. The collapse of corporeal integrity and the dissolution of subject-object boundaries, which Creed and Kristeva theorised, are transposed into sculptural form as formal principles. Tracing a longer arc from William Blake’s apocalyptic creatures through Giger’s biomechanical designs to Louise Bourgeois’s organic-yet-threatening forms, the paper argues that the surrealist legacy persists here not as style but as an enduring psychic operation: the confrontation with what exceeds rational containment.
Bio: Martina Genetti is an art historian and curator in the Contemporary Art Collection at Vienna Museum, Austria, working at the intersection of art and film. She is currently preparing a major annual exhibition on Dread and Desire - Aesthetics of Horror in Contemporary Art, scheduled for 2027 at musa, Vienna. Recent publications include ‘Image Politics of Affection and Care’ (in Care Matters, 2026), ‘Fragile Communication: Dialogues after a Cancellation’ (Texte zur Kunst, No. 138, 2025), ‘Subversive Horror’ (Tagebuch, 4/2025), and ‘Nicht einfach kontextualisieren’ (with Simon Nagy, in Nicht einfach ausstellen. Kuratorische Formate und Strategien im Postnazismus, 2025).
The New Exquisite Corpses of Women Artists: Hybrid Bodies and Social Claims
Sara Damiani | University of Bergamo, Italy
Abstract: My talk aims to investigate how some contemporary women artists work on the heterogeneous, random, and provocative configuration of bodies from a more specifically sociopolitical perspective, framing the Surrealist practice of collage and the exquisite corpse as exemplary techniques for displaying a hybrid and metamorphic human being. They affirm the need to not only comprehend the posthuman subject’s fluid and open identity, but also to use it as a tool to condemn the persistent discrimination based on gender and ethnicity. More specifically, I will focus on some works by Lilia Ziamou, who reinterprets the Surrealist exquisite corpses and mannequin trope to counter the dehumanising (and still pervasive) objectification of the female body, as well as by Amy Karle, who reflects on new hybrid identities both between different individuals and between man and technology, even taking into account the potential for a digital afterlife. I will also consider Alice Thickett’s collages, which she uses as artistic methodologies to investigate the ethical and cultural implications of bioengineering cut-and-paste practices such as xenotransplantation.
In short, my talk aims to assess how the visual poetics of Surrealism can be viewed as an interpretive key for new artistic research around the heterogeneous bodies of post- and trans-humanism, particularly with regard to the necessity of undermining certain collective identity norms based on binary and marginalising dynamics (male/female, animate/inanimate, natural/artificial, etc.).
Bio: Sara Damiani is a researcher in Museology, Art Criticism, and Restoration at the University of Bergamo (Italy). Her main research areas explore the relationship between art, science and new media. She studied the myth of Medusa, dream iconography and the relationship between visual culture and medicine in the context of interdisciplinary practices of organ transplantation. Her publications include L’atelier dei sogni (2012); Fuori quadro (2013); La cultura delle immagini (2015); Arte e cultura digitale (2020).
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To See the Shadow You Have Become: Heather B. Swann’s ‘Performance Tools’
Hugh Magnus | University of Melbourne, Australia
Abstract: From 2014-2018, Heather B. Swann crafted a series of ‘performance tools’, stand-alone sculptures to be activated by singers, poets and artists. Rather than simple ‘props’, these works have a distinct life both in their dormant state, but are intrinsically connected to the body of their designated performer once active. The artist stresses the importance of many of these objects having been made ‘for particular people’. For example, Rag for a Blind Girl (dress for Astrid Connelly) (2016), a silk dress embedded with hundreds of nineteenth century glass eyes, was sewn explicitly for the titular soprano. In the specificity of these works, Swann’s ‘performance tools’ become a kind of symbolic prosthesis, augmenting, enhancing and hybridising the qualities of the body that they contain. The abhuman quality that the performer takes on in using Swann’s ‘tools’ places the body upon the threshold of monstrosity, a place of yearning, contemplation and deep sadness.
This paper proposes to analyse this group of sculptures in the light of the long legacy of Surrealist ritual, placing them in the company of works from Joan Jonas’ Mirror Piece I (1969) to Louise Bourgeois’ She Lost It (1992). In the repetitive, cyclical nature of these works’ activation, one can go back even further, to the baroque sculptures of Luisa Roldan and the Melpomene mask of Greek tragedy. With their apotropaic eyes, uncertain gestures and multi-layered symbolic force, Swann’s work realises Andre Breton’s search for “the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality”.
Bio: Hugh Lorenzo Magnus is an emerging writer and art historian. He was born on Nununi Country in Tasmania and now lives in Narrm/Melbourne. He is interested in desire, repair and the difficulties of history. Hugh’s work has appeared in Memo Review, Un Magazine and Art and Australia among other publications, including research on Bea Maddock, Julie Gough and Nora Turato. Hugh holds a BA from the University of Melbourne in History and Art History, and completed his honours in Art History in June 2026.