Networks of Individual Subversion: Surrealism in the Levant

In 1938, André Masson defined surrealism as "the collective experience of individualism" (Short, 1966). This seemingly contradictory coexistence of collectivism and individualism constitutes a key concept when analysing the emergence of surrealist practices as a transnational movement, instead of a primarily French-centric cultural phenomenon. The upshot of my analysis is to assess how surrealism emerged and developed in the areas of Turkey and Syria. I focus on two artists: the Syrian Fateh al-Moudarres (1922-1999) and the Turkish Yuksel Arslan (1933-2017). In my thesis, I analyse how the tension between individualism and collectivism was instantiated in their work, by teasing out the artists' connections to local collectives, to the French surrealist movement and their personal understanding of surrealist ideas and practices, in order to reveal productive connections between them and similar strategies exploited by Arslan and al-Moudarres in their process of cultural negotiation between local and global cultural and socio-political stimuli. The overarching aim of my analysis, moreover, is to provide an alternative model for the study of surrealism on a world scale to the traditional methods exploited in the existing literature.