December 6, 2025
2-6pm

at the Philosophical Research Society
3610 Los Feliz Blvd, Los Angeles

Tickets: Free to UCLA students & PRS members with code UCLAstudent11 / $10 general admission

This unique gathering brings together artists, scholars, UCLA students and the public to explore the power of surrealist methods—past and present—as tools for resisting systems of domination and imagining new possibilities for being. From spiritual resistance to cultural subversion, surrealism has long offered a way to sidestep the normative, the colonial, and the fascistic in pursuit of radical freedom. Together, we will examine the contradictions and complexities within the Surrealist tradition and its entanglements with institutional power, gender, and race. This symposium is a call to those who believe that art, performance, spirituality, and speculation can resist the flattening forces of fascism and imagine other worlds.

Claudie Massicotte is a learning designer in San Francisco, California. She previously worked as Assistant Professor of Literary Theory and Criticism at Young Harris College and as a Postdoctoral fellow in French and Francophone Studies at UCLA. She is the author of Trance Speakers: Femininity and Authorship in Spiritual Seances, 1850-1930 (McGill-Queen’s UP) and Hélène Smith: Occultism and the Discovery of the Unconscious (Oxford UP). 

Sarana Mehra is a South Asian British American artist whose work examines the relation between the body, body-politic and the cycle of disintegration and evolution in human-made systems like art, language and technology. Sarana Mehra is a universal healthcare activist and has worked alongside the National Nurses Union with groups like HealthyCA before co-founding LA-based artist activist group Artists 4 Democracy. She was a member of the Binder of Women artist collective. Sarana gained her BFA from the University of Oxford and her MFA from Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design in London.

Jennifer Moon (they/she; b. 1973, Lafayette, Indiana; lives and works in Los Angeles) is an interdisciplinary life-artist whose work investigates the co-production of organizing systems (social systems, institutional structures, power relations, scientific theories, emotional frameworks, etc.) and how these various systems are entangled, co-constituted, performed, and perpetuated through bodies (human, more-than-human, material, immaterial). Drawing from queer life, science, self-help, popular culture, the deeply personal, and fantasy, Moon’s work mobilizes possibilities to reconfigure our relationship to power, to reignite the social and political imaginaries, and to stimulate change beyond binaries, hierarchies, and capital.

Lezley Saar is a mixed media artist, currently living in Los Angeles, whose works include paintings, banners, collages, book-works, dioramas, photography and installations. Her various series include: The Atheneum, Anomalies, Mulatto Nation, Tooth Hut, Autists’ Fables, Madwoman in the Attic, Monad, Gender Renaissance, A conjuring of Conjurors, Black Garden, and Saudade. Presented in a surrealist and symbolist style, the works deal with notions of identity, race, gender, beauty, mysticism, colonialism, sanity, and normalcy. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, and is in museum collections such as LACMA, MOCA, CAAM, The Kemper, The Crocker, and the Studio Museum of Harlem.