Day 1: Surrealism and Anti-Fascism

Surrealism and Anti-fascism
The Political Imagination between Reason and Dream
New York University, November 14-15

Day 1: Nov. 14, Remarque Institute, 4-6:30pm
60 Fifth Avenue, 8th Floor

Program information

2024 marks the centenary of the Surrealist movement – more specifically of its founding manifesto and attendant journal. The title of the latter, La Révolution surréaliste (1924-29) made plain the movement’s ambition: nothing less than a social and political revolution, a synthesis of unconscious desire and waking reality. Hamstrung by both communist resistance to its “interior model” and by the rise of fascism and a new World War, this sur-reality never came to pass in the terms imagined by its originators.

Yet Surrealism’s influence upon everything from Spanish Civil War protest, the Négritude and Black Arts movements, queer theory, Situationism, and other activist phenomena reveals its early anti-colonialist and anti-fascist agitation to be not merely the product of a historical contingency, but a possible model for radical politics more universally.

This conference marks Surrealism’s centenary while attending to its ideological legacies – in the wake of the movement’s frequently de-politicized museumification on the one hand, and an international resurgence of neo-fascist politics on the other. The conference is inspired by and coincides with the Lenbachhaus’s exhibition, BUT LIVE HERE? NO THANKS: Surrealism and Anti-Fascism (October 15, 2024 – March 2, 2025) as well as the publication accompanying it.

Sponsored by the Department of French Literature, Thought, and Culture; Department of Spanish & Portuguese; Department of Italian Studies; Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò; Deutsches Haus; Espacio de Culturas @KJCC; Remarque Institute; NYU Humanities Center; Center for European and Mediterranean Studies; Department of Comparative Literature; XE Experimental Humanities; Lenbachhaus Munich.

THURSDAY NOVEMBER 14
Remarque Institute, NYU
60 Fifth Avenue, 8th Floor
New York, NY 10011

4–5:30pm

Translation at the Trial of the Real World: Surrealism and Anti-fascist Protest Politics
Stephen Duncombe, Gallatin School of Individualized Study, NYU

‘They will torture you my friend – Artaud’: Surrealist Anti-fascist Iconography in the American Art Left, 1969-72
Joanna Pawlick, University of Sussex

Moderator: Robert Zeller

5:30pm

Surrealism & Antifascism: A Discussion of Exhibition and Anthology (Hatje Cantz, 2024)
Adrian Djukic (Lenbachhaus, Munich), Stephanie Weber (Lenbachhaus, Munich), and Ara H. Merjian (NYU) in conversation with Stefanos Geroulanos (NYU)

6:45pm

Reception