Friday 6 June 2025

12:30 Welcome (HT-101 University Center)

13:00–14:30 Panel I: Surrealism in Iceland (HT-101 University Center)

  • Benedikt Hjartarson (University of Iceland), “I know almost everything about this movement”: Halldór Laxness, Surrealism and the Provincial Avant-Garde
  • Ásdís Rósa Magnúsdóttir (University of Iceland), Paul Éluard í íslenskum þýðingum
  • Guðmundur Brynjólfsson (University of Iceland), Þýðingar Jóns Óskars á evrópsku súrrealistunum

14:30–15:00 Coffee break

15:00 Keynote I (VHV 023)

  • Abigail Susik (Willamette University), Lenin at The Leisure Club: Accelerating Revolution with Marcel Mariën and the Belgian Surrealists in the 1950s

16:00–16:30 Coffee break

16:30–18:00 Panel II: Surrealist Strategies and Praxis (VHV 023)

  • Brittany Jones (University of St. Andrews), Un travail ingrat: Printing Surrealism in Paris and Chicago
  • Sami Sjöberg (University of Jyväskylä), Laboratory and Theft: Experimental Poetic Strategies in Belgian Surrealism
  • Sólveig Guðmundsdóttir (University of Iceland), Encounters with/in Surreality. The case of Medúsa and Gallery Skruggubúð

Saturday 7 June 2025

09:00 Panel III: Transcultural Exchange (VHV 023)

  • Jaewuk Kim (University of Southern California), Taxidermized Flâneur: 1930s Korean Surrealist Literature through Yi Sang and 34 Literature
  • Elliot King (Washington and Lee University), Reinterpreting Dalí’s Persistence of Memory: Onanism and the Exorcism of Revolution
  • Alejandra García Herrera (Freie University Berlin), From surrealism and beyond: Wolfgang Paalen and César Moro as cultural mediators in the 1940s

10:30 Coffee break

11:00–12:00 Panel IV: Border Zones and Territories (VHV 023)

  • Krzysztof Fijalkowski (Norwich University of the Arts), Surrealism’s Zones
  • Rose-Anne Gush (TU Graz), The Chambers of the Hands, the Vaults of the Head, Forbidden Rooms and other border territories: notes on art, form and the unevenness of global capitalist modernity

12:00–13:30 Lunch break

13:30 Keynote II (VHV 023)

  • Kristoffer Noheden (Stockholm University), The Art of Psychophany: Epiphanies of Mind in International Surrealism

14:30–15:00 Coffee break

15:00–16:30 Panel V: Nordic Perspectives (VHV 023)

  • Andrea Kollnitz (Stockholm University), Too Far from Reality? Surrealism in Swedish Discourse and Art Historiography 1930–70
  • Brynjarr Þór Mendoza (University of Turku), Global —or Eternal — Curiosity in the Surrealism of Sjón’s From the Mouth of the Whale
  • Æsa Sigurjónsdóttir (University of Iceland), Masking the Anthropocene: Björk’s tribute to the nonhuman

16:30 Closing remarks

Evening Program: Surrealism in the North (Mengi)

In collaboration with Reykjavík UNESCO City of Literature

19:00 Roundtable discussion with Andrea Kollnitz, Benedikt Hjartarson, Kristoffer Noheden, Æsa Sigurjónsdóttir, Sólveig Guðmundsdóttir, Ólafur Jóhann Engilbertsson and Sjón

20:00 Smurjón

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