In conjunction with the exhibition BUT LIVE HERE? NO THANKS: Surrealism and Anti-Fascism (15 October 2024 – 2 March 2025) at the Lenbachhaus, New York University is organising a conference on 14 and 15 November 2024.
Image above: Max Ernst, L’ange du foyer (Der Hausengel) / (The Angel of Hearth and Home), 1937, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen – Sammlung Moderne Kunst in der Pinakothek der Moderne München, 2013 als Schenkung der Theo Wormland-Stiftung GmbH erworben / Modern Art Collection, Pinakothek der Moderne Munich, acquired in 2013 as a gift from the Theo Wormland-Stiftung GmbH © Max Ernst / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2024
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.
WHEN?
Thursday, 14 November, 16:00 – 18:45
Remarque Institute, 60 Fifth Avenue, 8th floor
RSVP required: https://amxe.net/m6a9gv2r-ws52rjgh-yr2lq2t2-kfn
Friday, 15 November Espacio de Culturas @KJCC, 9 a.m. – 6 p.m.
53 Washington Square South
RSVP required: https://amxe.net/m6a9gv2r-ws52rjgh-5wi0r0qf-p26
WHERE?
New York University
New York, NY
10012, Stati Uniti
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