The Surreal Body as Theatre of the Mind:
Women, Surrealism and Contemporary Visual Culture
Abstracts & Speaker Bios
Day Two: Thursday, 1 October
4.00 - 10.30 pm AEST (UTC + 10)
PANEL 4
Ecologies of the Surreal Body: Hybridity, Care, and More-than-Human Relations
Moderator: Irene Calvi | Irene (she/her) 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.
Care, Ecological Kinship and Hybridity in Patricia Piccinini’s More-than-Human Art
Christina Haupt | University of Passau, Germany
Abstract: This paper examines the legacy of Surrealism in contemporary visual culture through the hybrid worlds of Australian artist Patricia Piccinini (*1964). Framed within the symposium’s focus on “The Surreal Body as Theatre of the Mind,” I argue that Piccinini reactivates and transforms Surrealist strategies to articulate an ethics of care in the age of biotechnology and ecological crisis.
Piccinini’s sculptures present maternal, hybrid figures whose pale naked bodies signal biotechnological engineering rather than sexual availability. Unaware of or indifferent to their nakedness, these figures inhabit their vulnerability with quiet strength. Their wrinkled, hairy, bulky, and ostensibly “monstrous” forms challenge normative ideas of beauty and initially evoke the grotesque and the abject. Yet this initial reaction of estrangement gradually gives way to empathy. The hybrids are depicted in moments of tender care for their offspring, their gestures intimate, their faces marked by a quiet, melancholic introspection.
By frequently merging human bodies with endangered species, Piccinini foregrounds the climate crisis and insists on a shared, precarious “animalness”. In doing so, she echoes feminist posthumanist thought, particularly Donna Haraway’s call to reimagine kinship beyond the human. Her work also resonates with women Surrealists such as Dora Maar and Leonora Carrington, whose experimental mythic and hybrid beings opened imaginative spaces for alternative subjectivities. I argue that Piccinini positions the surreal body as a contemporary theatre of the mind that stages care, interspecies intimacy, and ecological responsibility.
Bio: Christina Haupt (*1995) is a doctoral researcher in Environmental and Technological History at the University of Passau under Prof. Dr. Stephanie Zehnle. Her dissertation examines the work of Patricia Piccinini, whom she has met and interviewed on several occasions. Trained in art history and intercultural communication, in Germany, Hungary, Ireland, and Austria, she works at the intersection of visual culture and environmental humanities. She has collaborated, among others, with the Jane Goodall Institute. Christina has presented at international conferences, including the World Environmental Education Congress, and will publish an article on religion and environment this year.
linkedin.com/in/christina-patricia-haupt-4484161a7
Inter-Precarity: Hybrid Bodies, Queer Materialism, and the Surrealist Legacy from Leonor Fini to Wangechi Mutu
Corey Ratch | University of Tübingen, Germany
Abstract: This essay pairs Argentinian-Italian artist Leonor Fini’s 1940s oil paintings with the contemporary collage and sculpture of Kenyan-American artist Wangechi Mutu, arguing that both bodies of work audaciously trouble the fixed, hierarchical, and normative boundaries between categories of being. While associated with but independent from Surrealism, Fini created paintings populated by hybrid beings that cross traditional divisions: human-animal, human-plant, animate-inanimate, male-female, living-dead. Mutu’s work operates in the same ontological territory, but where Fini’s category crossings emerge from a fascist context of enforced biological hierarchy, Mutu’s engage directly with the colonial history of racialising the Black female body through its presumed proximity to the animal and the natural.
Drawing on Karen Barad’s physics of touch, Jane Bennett’s political ecology of things, and Mel Y. Chen’s concept of animacy, the essay argues that Fini’s nature paintings touch on what I term “inter-precarity”—a mutual vulnerability and affective engagement between all forms of matter that resists hierarchical distinctions between human and nonhuman, subject and object, life and death. The paper traces Fini’s queer materialist ecology forward into Mutu’s contemporary practice, where the stakes are explicitly racialised, arguing that what was latent or displaced in Fini (especially the racialised bodies of her male nudes) becomes explicit and politically foregrounded in Mutu’s work. Other contemporary women artists like Patricia Piccinini, Berlinde De Bruyckere, and Firelei Báez extend this legacy of hybrid figures in art across different geographical and cultural contexts.
Bio: Corey Ratch holds a PhD in art history from Columbia University and specialises in interwar French and German art, the history of photography, eco art history, critical animal studies, Surrealism, Northwest Coast art, and images of death, violence, and trauma. His dissertation detailed the visual history of the modern slaughterhouse and factory farm and the impact of images of slaughtered animals. As a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Tübingen, his recent courses have included “Women in Photography” and “Precarity: Animals and Death in Modern Visual Culture.”
Edith Rimmington, Ecofeminism and Surrealism: Resonances Today
Tor Scott | National Galleries of Scotland, United Kingdom
Abstract: In 1946, in the magazine Savoir Vivre, several contributing artists published their responses to a surrealist questionnaire. When asked ‘What do you love most?’ the British painter and poet Edith Rimmington (1902-1986) replied ‘Everything that excites my curiosity, from the sun to the life created by a rotten apple’ (Rosemont 1998, 214). This fascination with the natural world and its potential for rot, rebirth and metamorphosis, was a driving force and inspiration in all aspects of Rimmington’s life. It can be found throughout her oeuvre, where ecological metaphors are ubiquitous and strange creatures roam. In these surreal ecologies, the divisions and distinctions between the natural and the manmade are blurred, allowing for an examination of the relationships between objects, plants, minerals, animals and humans in an ever shifting, ever changing universe. From the terrestrial to the cosmic, Rimmington’s ecophenomenological poetics align the capitalising and plundering of natural resources with the systematic degradation and disregard of human life (Lidström & Garrard 2014, 37). This paper will examine Rimmington’s work and compare it with that of artists working today, exploring the resurgence of ecofeminist, surrealist imagery found in the work of artists such as Georg Wilson, Jennifer Binnie, Wangechi Mutu and Penny Slinger. It will not only highlight the way in which contemporary artists use environmental themes and motifs as analogues for human experience, but also how these creative methods work to critique humanity’s abuse of, and inextricable role in, an ecosystem of both micro and macrocosmic proportions.
Bio: Tor Scott is an Assistant Curator at the National Galleries of Scotland. She has worked on exhibitions such as Grayson Perry: Smash Hits (2023), Fantastic Visions: 100 Years of Surrealism from the National Galleries of Scotland (2023-2024, touring), and most recently Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years (2025). Tor specialises in British Surrealism and is undertaking an AHRC-funded doctorate at the University of Edinburgh, focusing on the painter, photographer and poet Edith Rimmington (1902-1986). Her recent publications on Surrealism include the essays “Emmy Bridgwater and ‘The Spaces Where Swallows Try Their Turns’” (in Emmy Bridgwater: The Edge of Beyond, 2022, The Mayor Gallery), “The Vast Water Brain: On Femininity, Queerness and Violence in Psycho-Surreal Bodies of Water” (in Forbidden Territories: 100 Years of Surreal Landscapes, 2024, Thames & Hudson) and “Waves of Hair, Shores of Bones: Edith Rimmington’s Surreal Seas” (in Surrealism and Ecology, 2025, Vernon Press). When she is not studying Surrealism, Tor’s other research areas include Scottish folklore, Modern Spiritualism, contemporary Feminist art and art of the Celtic Revival.
Keynote Address
The Haunted House as Theatre of The Mind: The Unravelling Self in the Horror Films Relic (2020) and Hereditary (2018)
Victoria Carruthers | Australian Catholic University, Australia
This paper explores the haunted house as a surrealist metaphor for the unravelling mind in the contemporary psychological horror films Relic (2020) and Hereditary (2018). Influenced by a gothic sensibility, fantasy and myth, women surrealists often depicted homes in which the safety of everyday interiors were transformed into theatres of psychic disturbance, where invisible, unknown forces threatened to collapse the boundaries between inner and outer worlds and dreams and reality. Such spaces rendered memory and identity unstable.
Drawing on the surrealist fascination with abandoned houses, ruins and liminal interiors, this paper situates Relic and Hereditary within a longer visual tradition that positions the house as a metaphor for psychic states, which, in this case, are marked by grief, trauma and fragmentation. Echoing the claustrophobic interiors of women surrealists and the characteristic use of visual tropes designed to trouble the viewer in surrealist filmmaking, these works transform familiar domestic spaces and the everyday webs of family relationships into uncanny sites where something inexplicable moves beneath walls, ceilings and floors, and resists rational explanation. In Relic, the labyrinthine family home becomes an externalisation of dementia's corrosive effects on memory and identity as the mind is threatened with erasure. In Hereditary, the home is steeped in malevolent forces that eventually possess its inhabitants by feeding off their intergenerational trauma. By collapsing the distinction between psychological and supernatural horror, both films mobilise surrealist strategies of distortion, fragmentation and dissociation to depict families in crisis and the fragility of their psychological states. The haunted house thus becomes not merely a gothic setting but a surrealist body: an unstable architecture of memory in which the self gradually, and frighteningly, unravels.
PANEL 5
Bodies of Resistance: Dissidence, Gender, and Political Surrealism
Moderator: Paula Muhr | Paula (she/her) is a Berlin-based visual artist and researcher. She is currently Professor of Transdisciplinary Studies at the Brand University of Applied Sciences Hamburg. 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).
Surrealist Legacies in the Representations of Masculinities in the Fight Censorship Group
Ewa Giezek | École du Louvre | Jean Monnet University, Saint-Étienne, France
Abstract: In 1973, the artist Anita Steckel joined forces with artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Martha Edelheit, and Judith Bernstein in New York to form the Fight Censorship Group (FCG). Within the context of second-wave feminism, the members of this collective sought to combat the censorship of their erotic artworks. In the catalogue of the exhibition Sixties Surreal (Whitney Museum of American Art, 2025), Rachel Middelman underscored the surrealist legacies in the work of the FCG. However, the exhibition failed to address the fact that, within this group, representations of masculinities proliferated to champion the right of women to express their desire and to denounce the sexism inherent in the history of Western art. In this regard, how did the assimilation of Surrealism facilitate a visual interrogation of hegemonic masculinity for feminist artists from a critical and emancipatory perspective? The works that question representations of hegemonic masculinity, as defined by Raewyn Connell, in the output of the FCG artists, can be categorised into two major themes: alternative masculinities and the attack on patriarchal symbols. In their productions, Surrealist legacies are evident in the themes explored, such as political revolution, fragmented bodies, and erotic or dreamlike representations, as well as in the creative methods employed, including the use of humour, automatic drawing, collage, and the subversion of found objects. This presentation will draw upon archives such as Anita Steckel’s Feminist Peep Show and unpublished interviews with artists from the FCG, conducted during a research stay at Princeton University in 2026.
Bio: Ewa Giezek is a first-year PhD student at the École du Louvre and a doctoral fellow at Jean Monnet University, Saint-Étienne. She holds a dual research master’s degree in History from Sciences Po and in Art History from the École du Louvre. She has worked for the research programmes of the organisation AWARE: Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions, and for the Musée d’Orsay. Ewa undertook a research stay at Princeton University in spring 2026 as part of her doctoral dissertation, Dreamed Masculinities: Surrealist Legacies in Feminist Representations of Masculinities during the 1960s and 1970s in the United States.
Mary Low: The Militant Surrealist Woman’s Body
Rex Butler | Monash University, Australia
ADS Donaldson | Artist, curator and art historian, Australia
Abstract: In this paper, we look at the poet and political activist Mary Low, who was born in London in 1912 to Australian parents, educated in France and Switzerland and in 1933 met her first husband, the Cuban Surrealist poet Juan Brea, forming one of Surrealism’s “great couples”. They mixed with the Surrealist inner circle in Paris, went to live in Bucharest and Brussels, and then went on to fight for POUM (the Party of Marxist Unification) in the Spanish Civil War, where Low organised women militants and edited POUM’s English-language newspaper. They later moved to Prague, but when the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia, left for Cuba, and after Brea died Low published their jointly written Marxist Lectures, Contemporary Truth, in 1943, and her second volume of poems, Alchemical Remembrance, in 1946. (Her celebrated first volume, The Season of Flutes, was published in Bucharest in 1938.) In 1944 she married another militant Trotskyist, Armando Machado, and in 1957 published her third volume of poems, Three Voices. During this time, she had grown close to Che Guevara, but after the 1959 Revolution when Castro took power and turned to Stalinism, Low left with her children for Sydney, where her sister lived. Later her imprisoned husband joined her and they left for Miami, where Low lived the rest of her life.
All of this was drawn attention to in ADS Donaldson’s exhibition Mary Low at Minerva in Sydney in 2024. And altogether Low’s life and legacy offer a new voice, new eyes and a new body in Australian art: that of the militant Surrealist UnAustralian woman.
Bio: Rex Butler teaches Art History in the Faculty of Art Design and Architecture at Monash University. ADS Donaldson is an artist, curator and art historian.
Embodied Estrangements: Dissident Surrealism and the Collaged Body in Sylvia Palacios Whitman’s Cup and Tail (1977/78)
Lena Appel | Free University of Berlin, Germany
Abstract: This paper examines Cup and Tail (1977/8) by Sylvia Palacios Whitman as an instance of dissident surrealism embodied in performance. Though Whitman tends to be positioned in the historiography of postmodern dance, I argue for her reconsideration within a transhistorical discourse of surrealism. In this framework, the performing body refuses the male gaze through the use of the marvelous and estranges everyday objects, stripping them of their common use.
Drawing on Meret Oppenheim and Leonora Carrington, the paper situates Whitman’s work within a lineage that reclaims surrealism as a critical tool for reimagining gendered embodiment. In Cup and Tail, these everyday objects, as surreal dispositifs, together with the performing body, displace bodily coherence. Through this, Whitman performs a subtle but scathing critique of bourgeois lifestyle, its corollary understandings of gender and femininity and its logic of consumption. In lieu of signifying fixed meanings to this end, the work generates a field of perceptual indeterminacy grounded in humour, estrangement, and metamorphosis.
By way of Judith Butler’s concept of performativity and Susan Sontag’s idea of Surrealism as a mode of sensibility, I argue that the imagistic, deliberately anti-virtuosic choreographies of Cup and Tail destabilise the disciplined body and open it to non-normative, polymorphous readings. The “tail,” as an excessive appendage, hinders distinctions between the human and nonhuman, subject and object, and foregrounds embodiment as a site of transformation and resistance.
Bio: Lena Appel (she/her) is a performing arts director and PhD candidate at the Free University of Berlin, where she is affiliated with the Graduate School “Normativity, Critique, Change” and the Department of Theater Studies. Her PhD revolves around surreal choreographic strategies in performance art in the 20th and 21st centuries and the valency of the surreal as a theoretical framework in Performance Studies. Her writings have been published in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal, CARTHA Magazine, BERTZ+FISCHER and Monopol Magazine.
PANEL 6
Digital Dreams and Surreal 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.
Alien Kinaesthesia: Surrealist Defamiliarisation and the Femme Performing Body
Holly Durant | RMIT University, Australia
Abstract: This paper proposes that surrealist defamiliarisation can restructure how the femme-performing body is perceived. Drawing on choreographic practice and on Rothfield’s (2021) theorisation of movement subjectivity and Bourdieu’s habitus (1977), the performance in Alter Edith (Durant, 2021) demonstrates how repetition inscribes gendered ‘stickiness’ onto bodies over time, persistent corporeal inscriptions that resist direct confrontation. It argues that surrealist techniques of defamiliarisation, temporal warping, and the uncanny can generate “unsticking,” rendering the patriarchal gaze inoperable through alien embodiment and enabling femme and queer artists to construct alternative perceptual realities where embodied knowledge, desire, and subjectivity can be explored outside heteronormative frameworks.
The paper traces a lineage of women artists who have mobilised surrealist-inflected corporeal estrangement to refuse fixed femininity, from Claude Cahun’s fractured selfhood and Valeska Gert’s transgressive burlesques through Carolee Schneemann’s vulvic proscenium and Julie Rrap’s trickster reconfigurations to Mika Rottenberg’s surreal architectures of corporeal overflow, situating these within the abject (Kristeva, 1982), the grotesque (Bakhtin, 1984), and the strange (Fisher, 2016).
This paper examines how alien embodiment, through bodily distortion, material excess, and a reverse striptease in which accumulation replaces revelation, enables Alter Edith to expand the surrealist tradition into more-than-human realms (Abram 1997; Haraway, 2016). The idea of alien kinaesthesia is introduced as an expanded surrealist approach where the performer’s entire sensory system is reoriented towards the unfamiliar. “Transparent multiplicities,” in which dancer, woman, and alien coexist visibly, shift the performing body from an object of desire to a desiring subject, creating a new embodied understanding through sensuous, transgressive poetics (Lorde, 1978; Louppe, 2010).
Bio: Dr Holly Durant is an Australian choreographic artist whose practice-based PhD, “Alien Bodies: Choreographic Worlding toward Unfamiliar Corporeality” (RMIT, 2025), investigates corporeal estrangement and alien embodiment in performance. Alter Edith (2021) received the Green Room Award for Best Experimental Practice. Durant has presented at MONA/Dark Mofo (2014–2018), Finucane & Smith (2008–2017), Central St Martins (2024), and the Dialogical Bodies conference (2024).
Desire.exe: Cyberfeminism and the Legacies of Surrealist Photography in Mindy Seu’s A Sexual History of the Internet
Milly Kynaston | University of Sydney, Australia
Abstract: This paper examines Mindy Seu’s multimodal project A Sexual History of the Internet (2025–26) as a reconfiguration of the erotic body, situating socio-technological constructions of sexuality within the legacies of Surrealist photography. Across its dual format as book-object and participatory lecture-performance, the project extends Surrealism’s aesthetics of fragmentation into contemporary digital infrastructures, demonstrating its continued relevance for theorising embodiment under conditions of networked media.
Drawing on cyberfeminist frameworks, the paper positions Seu’s project as an urgent meditation on the synthesis of sexuality and technology - an interrelation anticipated within Surrealist visual culture. The book-object assembles a nonlinear narrative of internet artworks, while the lecture-performance is centred around an immersive activation of the participant’s personal smartphone, foregrounding the operations of platform-based visual economies and their embedded circuits of sexual exchange. The smartphone is proposed as a contemporary fetish object, reconfiguring the Surrealist camera’s function, and redistributing erotic agency onto the device-as-interface.
The paper situates Seu’s work in relation to women and genderqueer photographers associated with the Paris Surrealist movement, including Claude Cahun and Florence Henri, whose formal strategies of photomontage and mirror imagery destabilise the coherence of the female body. Fragmentation is rearticulated as a critical intervention into normative regimes of representation, further mobilised by Seu through a digitally mediated lens.
Ultimately, A Sexual History of the Internet reframes the body within a cyberfeminist present, extending Surrealism’s aesthetics of dismemberment into digital assemblage, while foregrounding how women and queer subjects produce and navigate living techno-visual histories.
Bio: Amelia (“Milly”) Kynaston is an MPhil candidate in Art History at the University of Sydney, where she holds a Bachelor of Arts with First Class Honours in Art History and a Bachelor of Advanced Studies in Media and Communications. Her research focuses on photography and digital technologies, Surrealism, and gender and sexuality studies. Alongside her academic work, she is Gallery Manager at Dominik Mersch Gallery, operating across Australian and international contemporary art contexts.
Do Cyborgs Dream of Digital Penes? Freud, Firestone and the Cyborg (We Perform)
Angelique Joy | RMIT University, Australia
Abstract: Does our subconscious mind possess phallic desires? Or, do we dream of worlds where our bodies are extracted from the hierarchies they were deposited within? Do we dream of new, queer assembled selves that look out, from within?
Freud, deeply influencing the surrealists, wrote the female experience as neurosis and phallic envy, Shulamith Firestone, in 1971, re-wrote his theories as tools of social adjustment to reify familial power dynamics. Contemporary surrealist gestures of assemblage and self portraiture cut across Freud’s theories and align with Firestone’s analysis.
Through Firestone’s feminist miss-reading of Freud, we examine contemporary, digital imagery of the assembled queer-femme body: the cyborg. This hyperreal/surreal form is claimed as a site of social re-coding, to rewrite, to retell, and to remake our digital dreams material.
Bio: Angelique Joy is a multidisciplinary visual artist and early career academic, currently a PhD candidate at the School of Art, RMIT. They work with textile sculpture, text, photography, moving image, and virtual extensions of their work to explore neuroqueer and posthuman ways of being and caring. Angelique has published and exhibited their works nationally and internationally. Nationally, they have been a Bowness Photography prize, Fisher’s Ghost and Waterhouse art prize finalist. Internationally they have shown works at the 2022 Bandung Photography Triennale in Bandung, Indonesia and the 2022 Pingyao International Photography Festival in the Pingyao Ancient City, China.
CLOSING REMARKS