How can surrealism be reimagined as feminist resistance? This is the question that drives ‘The Traumatic Surreal’ at the Henry Moore Institute, an exhibition that unpacks the generational trauma left by Nazism for postwar women. Drawing on co-curator Patricia Allmer’s book of the same name, it features work by Germanophone artists who use surrealist sculptural traditions to challenge the Nazi credo of Kinder, Kirche, Küche (Children, Church, Kitchen). Under a regime that enforced women’s subjugation to domesticity, cages – both literal and figurative – severed tails, blades, feathers, and hair recur throughout.
