literature festival
The Surrealist Continuum is a two-day festival programme that reimagines Surrealism on the centenary of its founding, celebrating overlooked artists and their intersecting paths where they were not traditionally thought to have touched.
‘Jazz is my religion and surrealism is my point of view,’ writes Ted Joans, summarising in a few words the eclectic, transformative quality of surrealism.
Often mistaken for being quaint, surrealism is a profound medium for exploring and enacting liberation, rebellion, and the reimagining of reality.
Surrealism emerged in the aftermath of World War I and sought to counter Western rationalism by expressing the depths of the mind through automatism, writing, poetry, and psychoanalysis.
André Breton defined Surrealism as ‘pure psychic automatism’ in the 1924 Manifeste du Surréalisme, describing a way of thinking that was not determined by reason and morality. Yet despite its global reach, Surrealism has often been understood as a male, European (especially French) movement.
The Surrealist Continuum: Other Geographies and Lines of Connection seeks to counter this limited narrative by focusing on under-examined representatives of Surrealist thought and practice from different countries, such as Suzanne Césaire, Joyce Mansour and Ted Jones, while also forging new connections to the works of contemporary artists such as Ben Okri, Yoko Tawada, Sergei Parajanov, Fiston Mwanza Mujila, Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, and Jan Švankmajer.
