ONLINE SYMPOSIUM
The Surreal Body
as Theatre of the Mind:
Women, Surrealism and Contemporary Visual Culture
Wednesday 30 September &
Thursday 1 October 2026
The symposium has now concluded, but information on the program can be found below.
Join our new research network
Building on the symposium, the Women, Surrealism and Contemporary Visual Culture Research Network connects scholars, artists, curators and researchers internationally. Membership is free.
About
This two-day online symposium featured research and reflections by Australian and international presenters on the legacy of surrealism in contemporary visual culture. Speakers particularly foregrounded 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.
Research Network
The Women, Surrealism and Contemporary Visual Culture Research Network connects scholars, artists, curators and researchers internationally.
Day 1 Wednesday 30 September 4:00-11:00 pm AEST UTC/GMT +10 hours
4:10-6:15 pm | Panel 1
Fragmented Bodies, Mediated Images: Surrealism in Film and Collage
6:30-7:30 pm | Artists Roundtable
Jaime Tsai in conversation with artist Tara Marynowsky (Aus), and Mimi Kelly with Jane Burton (Aus) on the influence of Surrealism on their artworks.
7:45-9:15 pm | Panel 2
The Commodification of the Body: Surrealism, Fashion, and Visual Culture
9:30-11:00 pm | Panel 3
Monstrous-Feminine and Sculptural Bodies
Day 2 Thursday 1 October 4:00-10:30 pm AEST UTC/GMT +10 hours
4:10-5:45 pm | Panel 4
Ecologies of the Surreal Body: Hybridity, Care, and More-than-Human Relations
6:00-7:00 pm | Keynote Address
Associate Professor Victoria Carruthers | Australian Catholic University, Australia
“The Haunted House as Theatre of The Mind: The Unravelling Self in the Horror Films Relic (2020) and Hereditary (2018)”
7:15-8:45 pm | Panel 5
Bodies of Resistance: Dissidence, Gender, and Political Surrealism
9:00-10:30 pm | Panel 6
Digital Dreams and Surreal Bodies
Keynote & Artist Guests
Associate Professor, Art History and Theory, Australian Catholic University, Australia. Carruthers' research on surrealism includes her book Dorothea Tanning: Transformations, Lund Humphries, 2020.
Marynowsky works across the media of painting, drawing, and film and incorporates found images into her practice. Her work investigates recorded images and the historical representation of women.
Burton is an artist working with photography, film, and painting. Her work explores memory, longing, mortality and desire and is often darkly ambiguous
and enigmatic.