Foreward by
Luka Lucic
by Luka Lucic
Associate Professor, Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies, Pratt Institute
“Next Age Daydream: Surrealism Tomorrow – The Next 100 Years”
I’m an alligator.
I’m a mama-papa comin’ for you.
I’m the space invader.
I’ll be a rock ’n’ rollin’ bitch for you.¹
That’s David Bowie’s voice, tearing out of a guitar riff, buzzing like a neon nerve. When it first appeared in 1972, Moonage Daydream – Bowie’s surrealist reverie – wasn’t vigilant, it didn’t aestheticize, and it certainly didn’t ask for permissions. Folding fantasy and teen rebellion with futurama spectacle into one surreal landscape, it implored: don’t fake it baby, lay the real thing on me. Some fifty years later, on April 16, 2025, as we gathered to open Surrealism Tomorrow: The Next 100 Years, that song should have been playing as the background music at Pratt’s Student Union.
Even when dressed in Stardust glam, youth and authenticity cut deeper than any gloss and polish. Surrealism, in its original incarnation, thrived on that cut: the irruption of the unconscious into the everyday, the rupture in reality. Writing the Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, André Breton affirmed the relation of the unconscious to art: “If the depths of our mind contain within it strange forces capable of augmenting those on the surface, or of waging a victorious battle against them, there is every reason to seize them.”² But our exhibit Surrealism Tomorrow: The Next 100 Years was never meant to linger in nostalgia. The question posed to Pratt’s students as they produced their works commemorating the first century of the movement was not how they remember surrealism. They don’t. Instead, our question was what does surrealism become in their hands? The exhibition’s wager is that the future of surrealism – an art form dynamic and malleable like Freud’s description of the unconscious itself – belongs to voices not yet canonized, to young people making sense of a bewildering world with a blunt immediacy that refuses ornament.
If we had any expectations to begin with when we issued the call for submission in the early winter of 2025, they were all surpassed right at the start as nearly seventy student submissions poured in. Employing mediums ranging from painting and sculpture to photography, video game design, digitized claymation, and an 8-foot large-scale installation, students seized the opportunity to interpret and reinterpret surrealism. Their works do not seek to polish or retrospective gloss their often difficult experiences and psychological struggles; they erupt, provisional and raw, insisting that surrealism’s future is less about the re-creation of aesthetic lineage (if there ever was any!) than about experimentation and sense-making.
When disturbances of everyday life scramble psychological experience – when memories intrude and desires meddle with reason – people reach for cultural forms to make sense of it all.³ First come the words, eloquent or not, then gestures, objects, practically anything that can carry meaning, anything that can hold together fragments long enough for reflection to begin. In my research on the psychological development of migrants, I have watched bewilderment lean on narrative until it gradually becomes illumination.⁴ What begins as confusion or disorientation in the face of rupture often transforms, through storytelling, into a way of stitching fragments into coherence. The young artists here extend that same operation into matter: where language thins, metal wire, hair, watercolors, ceramics, leather straps, metal hooks, and etchings pick up the thread. These are not acts of aestheticization; they are acts of sense-making under pressure, imperfect and provisional.
In his 1915 essay The Unconscious⁵, almost as a side note, Freud wrestled with a deceptively simple but for art-making far-reaching question: what happens when a mental act – an idea, a desire, or fear, all charged with psychological energy – is transposed from the unconscious into consciousness? Does the mental act, Freud asks, undergo a second registration through this transposition, as if newly inscribed in consciousness? Or does it remain the same act, only shifted into a new state, like a current moving from one circuit to another? Does the repression lift, Freud wonders, if we simply tell a patient some idea he has at one time repressed: say, for example, that he carries guilt for surviving when another did not? While theoretically difficult to resolve when standing on its head, turned right side up through the process of art making, this question becomes: when an artist first gives form to an unconscious mental act –when it is rendered as an image, a motif, a material gesture – does the act of expression exhaust its psychological force? Three works from among nearly seventy submissions – Amit Aviv’s Don’t Stop Playing, Bobby Hay’s Fucking Unlovable, and Enzo Lederer-Morihisa’s Wars Within the Scars – suggest that even in their conscious material articulations, as the interactive couch, as the reworked welding jacket, as the etched scarred landscapes, the unconscious residue continues to haunt the work, giving it aura and the power to charm, irreducible simply to representation.
Don’t Stop Playing
Amit Aviv’s Don’t Stop Playing presents a couch stitched over with games, embroidered puzzles erupting from the soft domesticity of furniture. At first, the artwork reads as quirky: Sudoku where cushions should be. But the artist’s statement cracks the veneer. These games were not there for entertainment or even hobbies. They are part compulsions, part survival strategies, coping mechanisms hiding in plain sight. Play, in this sense, is neither frivolous nor innocent (if it ever is). It is the unconscious working obsessively, carving space away from grief, turning raw experience into gridded logic. The sudoku puzzles, sewn into a place of comfort, manifest both the conscious displacement – games rendered material, legible, even domestic – and the unconscious residue of what drives them. The couch itself becomes both lure and trap: a space to sink into, and a site where the invisible weight of repression is displaced into calculation, but not lifted.
Fucking Unlovable
If Aviv’s work aims to transpose heavier thoughts into the patterned distraction of games, Bobby Hay’s project Fucking Unlovable rips open the raw wound of grief and queerness. It arrives as fragments: a welding jacket, scarred, lined with red human hair; earth and wax contortions of a body in performance. The jacket – an old welding coat of his mother’s, patched and lined with red human hair – becomes a second skin. Earth works and wax casts of his own contorted body replicate performances of endurance and despair. Together they manifest, as he puts it, the experience of being “fucking unlovable.”
The pieces carry the weight of loss, the death of a brother, and the weight of queerness under domination. They resist coherence. They refuse to stage grief as something consumable. Freud wrote that unconscious processes are timeless, indifferent to chronology, subject only to displacement and condensation. Hay’s work is condensation made flesh: “returning to the body” Hay writes, “surrealism and the sublime evolve through something akin to a litmus test using the interior of the garment to capture the sense of a self-sheltered by a social passing exterior.” The earth casts are equally uncompromising. They are remnants of a body spiraling through space, traces hardened into soil and wax, almost materializing Bowie’s demand of the audience: “Keep your mouth shut / You’re squawking like a pink monkey bird / And I’m bustin’ up my brains for the words.”¹ What survives here is not the polished monument but the debris of performance, the negative space of gestures, endurance itself turned artifact.
War Within the Scars
Enzo Lederer-Morihisa’s etching, Wars Within the Scars / Who is the Target, is dense, almost unassimilable. Figures emerge from chaos: a woman rising after a nuclear blast, a starving stork absconding with her baby. The dreamscape is a trench, a ruin, a scarred city stacked underground, endlessly destroyed and rebuilt. The scar here is double: the scar of the dream, and the scar of generational trauma. Enzo’s family history runs through Hiroshima; the etching imagines what might have been glimpsed from a train window, arriving too late to enter, too early to forget. The etching visualizes repression not as silence but as catastrophic noise—bombardment that grabs the viewer by the lapels at first sight and has a hard time letting go. And yet, by engraving it, the artist stages a transgenerational second registration Freud wondered about. The unconscious trace is not erased, but etched anew, doubled, re-inscribed in acid and metal. The scar becomes surface. Yet the work doesn’t resolve the scene, but it does, for a fleeting second, make the chaos thinkable.
Surrealism Forward
What unites these works, Aviv’s couch, Hay’s jacket and earth casts, Lederer-Morihisa’s scar etching, is not a shared aesthetic style but a shared refusal to mock coherence. They do not resolve into beauty; they lay the real thing bare. And this is perhaps where surrealism, in the next 100 years, seems to be going. Away from the dream as froth, toward the dream as document. Away from Dalí’s melting clocks or de Chirico’s Child’s Brain as a representational style, toward surrealism as active working-through, as the unconscious making itself known—if not understood—through furniture, garment, debris, scar.
Freud cautioned that unconscious processes are indifferent to time, exempt from contradiction, oriented toward psychical reality more than external truth. These student works embrace that exemption. They create worlds that are contradictory and physically visceral. They show how life is lived not only as memory but as an ongoing process, and how art can hold both in the same object. In this sense, they confirm Freud’s hunch: unconscious material is never lost, only transposed. But they also radicalize it. For these young artists, transposition is not simply a movement from unconscious to conscious but from unconscious to material. Their works do not only register private coping; they offer us a seat on the sudoku couch, a glimpse inside the jacket, a map of the scar. They ask us to inhabit what they have made inhabitable – and in inhabiting it, to participate in meaning-making with them.
They are making art that is less about spectacle than about insistence—the insistence that the unconscious still speaks, still carves, still leaves traces; the insistence that sense-making can be material, communal, and defiantly unaestheticized. It is surrealism as a vital experiment, punk in its refusal of polish, electric in its honesty. It is surrealism that, in a Bowiesque voice, says: Keep your electric eye on me, don’t fake it, baby – in that demand lies surrealism’s next century.
losing our grip on purpose 