“The Future of Surrealism Is Collective”

by Emir Kapetanović

Los Angeles-based Filmmaker

As a filmmaker living in the US and originally from Bosnia and Herzegovina, a post-conflict country, most of my work has focused on trauma, conflict resolution, and freedom. Hence, when viewing the exhibition, I was surprised to see how much trauma and politics are present in the work of young artists from diverse societies who are significantly younger than I am. My films –  Children of Peace (2016), a documentary exploring the post-war generation in Bosnia, and When Santa Was a Communist (2024), a feature film reflecting on memory, ideology, and the afterlives of history – both wrestle with the persistence of trauma and the search for imagination in its aftermath. Yet, despite the focus on trauma, the work of Pratt artists that forms the corpus of the Surrealism Tomorrow exhibit still radiates optimism. Works span multiple media – including product design, installations, video games, movies, and paintings – so in one moment, the entire exhibition felt like a single, monumental artwork about the future of surrealism. That’s where I see its future: through cross-sector collaboration and exploring new media. I think it will be very interesting to see what these artists can create if they team up and use their own mediums to develop a shared artwork.

For example, Maya Ivona Peiu’s MAMA uses video art to immerse us in the turbulent waters of dream life, blurring terror and fascination in sequences drawn directly from her sleep paralysis. It reminded me of how surrealism has always thrived on that incoherent spark – what Breton called the eruption of unconscious life into daylight – but here it is rendered through digital media that can live on any screen. Similarly, Lucca Dohr’s Ditch the Basement Dweller(s) and Shoot the Sun Like Solar Flare turns the drift between waking and sleeping into a meditation on the trauma of losing one’s inner child. The Dalmatian onesie performance he stages is both absurd and devastating, collapsing innocence and degradation into one surreal sequence that lingers long after the film ends. And Brian Duval’s Pathogenesis pushes surrealism into yet another register, animating the microscopic world of infection and antibiotics into a dystopian, glitching landscape that asks us to reflect on desire, intimacy, and the fragility of the human body in the face of medical limits.

Taken together, these works show that surrealism today is not a matter of style but of urgency. It is about using every available medium – video, performance, 3D animation – to probe experiences of trauma, transformation, and survival. But what personally impressed me most is how these young artists channel the weight of their own struggles into forms that invite collaboration and dialogue. That, I think, is the enduring power of surrealism, and its strength going forward: to create new collective languages across media, and to insist that even the most private nightmares can become the seed of shared meaning. This, too, connects them to one of perhaps the most enduring traditions of surrealism: the surrealist games. Surrealist games first emerged in the 1920s, with Exquisite Corpse, automatic writing, and collective collage becoming enduring traditions. They embodied surrealism’s conviction that creativity was a collective enterprise, and the works in this exhibition echo that spirit, transforming private images and traumas into shared forms of meaning. Through games, early surrealists sought to dissolve the boundary between the individual imagination and the group’s shared dreamwork. In the works of these contemporary artists, I see the same impulse renewed: a sense that surrealism’s future lies not in isolated masterpieces but in collaborative acts, where different voices, techniques, and mediums collide to generate something larger than the sum of its parts.